LFingar Loc: Claverack, NY

If the hard drive itself has failed and no longer runs then a docking station will do you no good. Professional help would be required. For a healthy price, no doubt.

Capture48 Loc: Arizona

No, you won't be able to use your programs unless your BIOS will allow you to boot from that drive and you use that drive on the same computer as it was originally installed in. Which won't be possible if the motherboard was cooked.

Ralloh Loc: Ohio

I can not believe how many people are getting totally confused over this. Several keep asking how you get a "dead" drive to work. No where did you say the drive was dead, only the mother board. Good grief this is computers 101 stuff, not rocket science.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Those docking stations are great. You're lucky the lightning didn't fry the hard drive.

blackest Loc: Ireland

It depends on why it stopped and if its sata or ide.
If the why is because you dropped it then its a poor prospect for recovery
but if it just quit with no warning you may be lucky.

The drive inside the external enclosure will be the same as an internal drive (sata or ide pretty much) inside the enclosure is a small board which translates the sata/ ide interface into something which can be transfered by usb. (or firewire). There are 3 parts to an external drive. The PSU the converter interface board (between usb and sata/ide) and the physical hard drive. A bad Psu means no power and it doesnt work, a failed interface and it doesnt work, and a failed hard drive and it doesn't work.

If you are lucky its one of either the psu or the converter board and the hard drive is ok. If it is the hard drive then you are probably out of luck..

I say probably because there is a slim chance the hard drive could be repaired. If you had an identical model hard drive it is possible to change the hard drive controller board (on some hard drives depending on design) and then it might spin up and the data be recovered. Tends to be expensive to find a place who can do that and has a working controller board for that exact model hard drive. It could be a mechanical failure which is even worse. Still not entirely impossible but you can see why you pay big bucks to a data recovery company to try and recover data.

I hope at least you backup regularly since you had that loss. I hope your lucky.

First thing to do is to get that enclosure open and retrieve the hard drive identify what type it is (the older it is it is more likely to be ide scsi rather than sata) once its out you can see if it spins up, if it does it might be ok if it doesnt you might be able to put a different hard drive in that enclosure and reuse that.

There is a fair chance the PSU is dead they tend to be poorly made and overheat and die.

Big Bill Loc: Phoenix, AZ

If the drive is truly dead, you can't.
Often, though, the drive is only dead as a boot drive. In a laptop with one drive, that drive is the boot drive. In a desktop, the C: drive is (usually) the boot drive; any other drives are data drives. (Again, usually; some users make them alternative boot drives.)

There are a few ways a boot drive won't boot, but can still be seen if connected as a non-boot drive, which these converters do.

NYjoe Loc: US/UK

in a related experience a couple of years back I lost hundreds of photo files..years of work, after backing them up on an external hard drive in preparation for a reformat of my internal hard drive. When I went to retrieve the images from the external drive it chose that precise moment to end its life taking every scanned negative and digital image with it ...30 years of work. I paid a service named Ontrack $1400 to recover them. They could only do so for all files beginning with A,B or C. The rest were lost to the wind. (Moment of silence). Like a small coffin, my old extenal hard drive, containing its original discs of my lost work, was returned to me. It sits in a dark drawer where it awaits some new technology that will unlock it's breathless secrets...but I hold little hope of this. Lesson: backup your work on two external drives and pay an online file storage service to protect your work.

Big Bill Loc: Phoenix, AZ

Yes, you need a working computer.

And, obviously, if its your only computer with the dead boot drive, you need to do something to get a new boot drive in the computer.
For those of us who do regular backups, it relatively simple: install a new drive, pop the recovery CD into the machine, then copy the boot drive backup/image to the new boot drive, then use the converter to take the data from the old boot drive (if it is readable; it isn't always readable) and put it on the new drive.
The fact that the old drive isn't always readable is the reason many use a second, data, drive on our desktops. While it doubles the chance that a drive will fail, it also separates the data from the boot drive, making restoring form a failed data drive easier than from a failed boot drive that also contains the data. (This also makes it a little less expensive to replace the boot drive with a much faster SSD (Solid State Drive) that is smaller than a drive containing the normal boot drive programs, and thus less expensive.)

Big Bill Loc: Phoenix, AZ

There are a host of ways a drive can fail; corruption of the OS is certainly one of the more common ones.
Corruption of the sectors themselves is also common, as is corruption of the file directory.
Some of these can be corrected on a drive connected via a converter if you have the right software tools.

If you (not you, but the generic you) don't have a backup, having a friend who is computer savvy who can use these tools to recover your data for you, at a nominal cost (often just a six-pack) can be a life-saver.

Big Bill Loc: Phoenix, AZ

My experience is different.
If, for example, a person has an older system that has its motherboard fail (not a laptop, but a desktop), a new, faster, more powerful system can be built, and the old drive popped in, and the system will start just fine. The drivers for the new MB will need to be installed, but Windows I/O will start the system using generic I/O until you can do the new drivers, albeit at a slower rate (and missing some functionality).
This has been possible with Windows for some decades; I have no experience with Apple products.

BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

Oh yes! I use "Black X" with USB or eSATA. Can take either full size HD or laptop drive. I use it to mirror each of my 4 internal Mac Pro drives once a week. Whenever, I install a new program on my boot drive, I set it to make a new boot drive copy when I go to bed just incase the unthinkable happens.

dnathan

Not computer knowledgeable at all, except to use it, is it possible to back up the programs CS6 + many other photo programs so I can reload them if I am infected by a crawling encryption virus AGAIN???? I did have Acronis installed before the crash, but their explanation of how to use the "mirror' feature of their software is too complicated for me. I did subscribe to Geek Squad & they got me up & running, but I had to repurchase many programs. By the way, Topaz was wonderful in allowing me to reload free! Thanks for any input.

tradergeorge Loc: Newport, Kentucky

I AM a geek, but yes, your method will often allow access to files on a drive that is not otherwise damaged....

I love those little docks, and was fortunate to find one from a company called Cirago. It has two slots and in addition to allowing two drives to be attached to a PC via USB 3.0 (yes!!), it will clone one drive to another with a single button. This is the greatest way to backup I have found to date. If you do this regularly (it does overwrite the "new" drive), if your primary drive ever fails, you can just pop in the backup (after backing it up, of course), and you will be off to the races with your data intact as of the last backup...I have several PC's and each of them has a drive on my shelf, ready to jump into service. I do not backup everyday because that would take too long, but I do so after major additions are made. Plus, this is all in addition to my regular backups to my private cloud (NAS)...Cloning the drive just avoids that nasty need to reload the OS, with all that entails....Cheers!

tradergeorge Loc: Newport, Kentucky

These devices are quite common...Most of them are that same as a SATA USB box, but instead of having the box, they are open at the top so you can just plug in a drive. Some of the more sophisticated ones can "Hot-Swap, and others include card readers. As I said in another post, my favorite is one that has two slots and does a one-button drive clone.

tradergeorge Loc: Newport, Kentucky

That one is OK, but is just not as convenient as the ones that have a dock....What you illustrate there is what I used to do before the docks. I would just take apart a SATA-USB box and just use the board and power supply...It works great if you are not afraid to open things...