Out of sudden, our 3 years old Acer Aspire’s notebook screen turning to ‘half-dead’ last week. Nothing can be seen on the screen except black and white.

It leaves us wondering how to retrieve the very precious data back from the inside hard drive. We plan to bring it to notebook repair shop, but a quick thought save us a lot.

Just take out the hard drive and insert it into 2.5″ hard drive enclosure, pretty simple right

Before getting started, here is what you need. First of all, you need screwdriver that fits the size of the screws. No 1 size fit all, so it’s good idea to buy a set of screwdriver with different sizes from any DIY shops. I got mine at less than RM20 2 years ago, from direct selling.

The most important part is, you must have 2.5 ” hard drive enclosure. Depend on your hard drive storage-interface, it is either EIDE or PATA for old hardrive or SATA which is standard for all new hardrive nowadays. Again, it is quite cheap, I got mine at RM19, a basic hard drive enclosure without fancy looks.

Notebook hard drive usually placed at the back of the notebook. Loosen up the screws using suitable screwdriver to open the notebook cover and take out hard drive. Please be carefel not to touch other components. Make sure you pull out the hard drive with extra careful, and keep in mind that the hard drive’s SATA connector does connected to the notebook’s SATA port.

Here is the hard drive closer looks.

Plug the hard drive into the hard drive storage-connector.

Put it back into the hard drive enclosure carefully, and tighten the screws.

So my notebook’s hard drive is now properly ‘wrapped’ up inside the hard drive enclosure. Time for backing up the data!