Quote Originally Posted by sudsy View Post
Well the old laptop I have happens to have a very similar same brand and memory size hard drive. Fitted the faulty one and nothing. It doesn't run at all. Might have to find someone that can recover the data from a dead drive. I did think about swapping the platters but I don't want to risk destroying any data just in case it is recoverable
aaaw bummer. Sorry to hear that. The absolute best in data recovery that I've run across is a person in Canada. I don't know how quickly you need it up and running but if you want his info let me know. He does quite a bit of data recovery for folks all around the world. If you're looking for someone local, he might also be able to recommend someone.

I'm not sure if I can post the info or link here directly. Let me know if that would be helpful.

And good call on not platter swapping. If you've never done a platter swap before, they can be pretty tricky especially on the 2.5 inch notebook drives.It is also very easy to render the read/write heads useless on both drives if certain precautions aren't taken.

If you also have a drive that is the same Make/Model/Size and with a close enough serial number - which ever data recovery house you look into might be able to use it as a donor.