A reader asks: “My laptop isn’t working. How can I recover my data from the hard drive?”

If the actual laptop is broken — destroyed screen, liquid on the keyboard, or some such — there’s a good chance the drive itself is OK.

If that’s the case, you can physically salvage the drive and use another PC to recover the drive’s data.

First, unplug the laptop and remove the battery.

Flip the laptop over. Examine the bottom, which almost surely will have one or more flaps, doors, or screwed-on panels. The laptop’s hard drive sits behind one of those openings. Open ’em up until you find the hard drive.

Unfasten/unscrew/detach/unplug the hard drive. (Details vary.) The drive may be in a carrier or mount; you may need to unscrew the carrier before you can remove the drive. But most laptop classic hard drives are meant to be removeable, so odds are you’ll be able to figure it out without a lot of hassle.

You can then plug the drive into a PC, using an inexpensive (US$10 or so) hard drive-to-USB connector kit, widely available online (examples).

Once the salvaged drive is connected to your PC, you can use your normal file-management tools to recover the data from the drive.

On the other hand, if the drive itself is dead — won’t spin up, won’t respond to new connections — your best bet is probably a professional data-recovery service.

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