Extracting data from a laptop hard drive

So my friend has brought me her computer because she wants to get the data off of her hard drive. The motherboard of her laptop is fried, but the hard drive is in working condition. So I need to take the hard drive and somehow get the data off of it. The computer is at least 3 years (possibly up to 5 years) old.

I'd rather not open up my own laptop and switch out the hard drive with hers...that'd be a lot of trouble. Any tools I can use to easily hook up her hard drive from her laptop to any computer (externally) and get the data off of it?

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Originally Posted by DavidP

Any tools I can use to easily hook up her hard drive from her laptop to any computer (externally) and get the data off of it?

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Yes. You need one of those big acme horseshoe magnets and you push that up against the hard drive to suck all the data out and then you take the magnet and slap it on your hard drive and all the data will be transferred.

How about one of those USB enclosures?

If it's SATA (circa 2003 according to Wikipedia), the connector should be the same as desktop SATA.

If it's IDE, you'll need an adaptor/external enclosure.

This is the hard drive:

Seagate (ST9402113A) 40 GB ATA-100 Hard Drive Details and Product Specifications - Epinions.com

It's IDE

Then there's nothing much you can do except going out and buy an adaptor/enclosure.

If you have a desktop computer, you could plug it in as a second drive using a small adapter to convert mini-IDE connector into a standard IDE connector.

For laptop, as suggested, you need to use a USB-adapter or some such, since (nearly all) laptops do not have a second IDE connector.

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Mats