Saturday morning, my Dell Latitude D600 experienced what I'm now calling "catastrophic failure." After going through the problem with Dell (the computer turned off, but woudn't turn back on. the power light, and the numslock/capslock lights flickered, but there were not booting noises), the Dell technician said that it was the motherboard. Since I have a great deal of work on that computer, the tech suggested that I extract the hd (the computer is past warranty). After buying a Dynex DX-HDEN20 usb enclosure, and with the help of an IT guy here at my university, I tried hooking up the hd to two different systems. The hd whirs, and tries to boot, and i can hear the heads "resting", and the system briefly recognizes the hd, but then it dissapears and i get a "your new hardware did not install properly. it may not work" warning ballon. several times, we could see the hd in the device manager, but not in mycomputer.
our IT guy thinks it could be the system (it might work on a mac) or that there's a problem with the enclosure itself, because the hd doesn't seem to be making any of the usual alarming hd death noises. but this is also the guy who DROPPED the hd as he was removing it from the casing, prior to inserting it into the usb enclosure.
so i'm looking for opinions. my next step is to take it to the university's official IT people since i can't think of anything else to try on my own.
our IT guy thinks it could be the system (it might work on a mac) or that there's a problem with the enclosure itself, because the hd doesn't seem to be making any of the usual alarming hd death noises. but this is also the guy who DROPPED the hd as he was removing it from the casing, prior to inserting it into the usb enclosure.
so i'm looking for opinions. my next step is to take it to the university's official IT people since i can't think of anything else to try on my own.
