Problem recovering Hard Drive from Macbook

Hello all,

I hope someone can shed some light on this problem...

My macbook died a little while ago (no power), long story but Apple reckon the motherboard has gone which results in an expensive repair.

I need to recover the data from the hard drive (Toshiba SATA 120Gb - MK12345GSX).

I bought an External Hard Drive Enclosure (Integral Asaka 2.5" eSATA/IDE)

I hooked it up, the hard drive turns on, I can hear it spinning with no unusual noises....and the light comes on the enclosure. Problem is that my laptop does not recognise the drive....it's like it's not there... no drive appears... the manual says that there are drivers already installed in XP to recognise it as soon as it boots up....
I have tried this on a desktop and a powerbook.

Can anyone advise on this problem?

Much appreciated..

If your MacBook has a firewire port, and you have a firewire cable and another computer with firewire compatibility, you can put the hard drive back into your MacBook and "target boot" (boot up while holding "T"). If this doesn't work, I don't know what to say. Don't forget to move your files from your other computer to your MacBook!

Thanks for the advice. So if I were to plug in my faulty macbook with harddrive into say a powerbook with firewire... i can pull down tghe harddrive data into the powerbook?

PS. I dont have power to the Macbook, so how will the harddrive get turned on?
Thanks in advance...

The enclosure you purchased may not be working correctly or it's not the right enclosure. Some external enclosures are advertised as eSATA and IDE which one would assume that means it will work with a SATA drive, but in realty some do not. Make sure the enclosure is in fact compatible.

Also, hooking it to a PC is not going to work to extract the data unless you have a Windows driver which will allow access to the HFS file system. Instead, hook it to your Powerbook to extract the data.

Regards.

Yea, back during the Holidays I had a Blk Macbook that got drowned in beer. It ended up somewhat working after it dried out. Would turn on when it wanted to and as long as I left on it worked fine, but after a few months that went away of it turning on by itself. I just popped out the HD, put it in an external USB enclosure and used it as the boot drive for my Macbook Pro (selected it from system prefs as startup disk). Got all my stuff off of it and now its a 120gig extra drive! Guess if you got another Mac to use, it would be easier to get your files as you can just boot off of it?

Hi everyone... thanks for all your input.

I have tried doing the target boot option. Plugged my faulty macbook into a Powerbook via firewire... no joy, just get this 'Y' shaped logo after pressing 'T' on boot up. Can't work out how this would work if there is no power to the macbook.

Still no drive appearing on the powerbook....
Not yet swapped the enclosure yet....

Has anyone else got any suggestions?

Thanks