Recently my hard drive in my dell inspiron laptop has stopped working. It says device not detected. Talking to dell support, they are giving me a replacement hard drive. But I still want to get the data from the hard drive.

 

 

 

I did not hear and clicking or anything of the sort because I was wearing earphones playing a game. Then I saw a blue screen for a second, then it died. When I started it up, it couldn't find the hard drive.

 

 

 

I looked into it and it seems that I need a external enclosure. Is this enough to get the hard drive to transfer files? I'm not sure if there is any spinning problems with the hard drive. If there is, then my next course of action should be freezing the hard drive?

If the hard drive is no longer being detected by the computer as is, moving it to an external enclosure won't fix anything. All you'd be doing is moving a damaged drive to another port and trying to access the same damaged drive. You could try plugging it into another computer to rule out any other kind of hardware failure that's causing it to go unrecognized. If plugging it into another computer doesn't allow you to access it, you have a dead harddrive and the only way to recover anything from it is to send it to a data recovery business to physically open the drive (which you should NOT do yourself) and try to recover the data using working drive comonents.

About freezing your hard drive. I have heard mixed things about this from many other techs.

 

 

 

My IT teacher has said he did this and successfully recovered all of the data off a hard drive. On the other hand I have heard that this is not recommended because it could screw up the hard drive more or it just doesn't work from numerous people. If you do decide to try it, let me know how it works out.

 

 

 

If you do want to ship it off to a drive recovery place, you need to decide how much that data is worth to you. These data recovery places can charge hundreds of dollars.