Hi all. I'm new here and this is my first post.

My computer knowledge I'd put at average or above but the following is beyond me:

I have a damaged desktop CPU which will not power up at all. It's shock damage, but I'm not sure which component(s) is/are dead.

I want to retrieve data from the hard drive.

I have a laptop.

Is there any way I can hook up the laptop directly to the CPU or to the hard drive to retrieve the data? If so, can you give me a step-by-step and tell me what equipment I need?

Advice from someone with experience/knowledge would be much appreciated.

Cheers.

The easiest way is to put the hard drive into an external USB enclosure such as:

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...rive+enclosure

Yup, that should work. Thanks.

No problem. Let us know if we can help further.

...And I managed to pick up the hardware for a mere 15 bucks all in from eBay. A hell of a lot better than the several hundred being quoted by data-retrieval guys. Thanks again.

Sounds good.

Always best to do it yourself in my opinion.