Fun with File Recovery

Chrissy's laptop died. Just died. It won't power on with either the battery or the power adapter anymore (even when the battery has a charge). I even shelled out for a new battery thinking that was the problem based on how it had been behaving. DOH! Dead laptop.

So anyway, I wanted to make sure I could recover any files from the drive so I bought one of these. It is a USB to IDE & SATA for 1.8"-5.25" drives. Great! it arrived today. I rip the hard drive out of the laptop plug it into my windows PC and Windows gets confused and says the drive has to be initialized before it can use it. Umm...no...I will try something else. So I plug it into my Mac Mini, and low and behold, it works perfectly. Now I will take the time to point out that it was a WINDOWS laptop with Windows XP Home edition installed and for some reason VISTA had a problem reading the hard drive but OS X read it perfectly. Way to go Micro$0ft.

Anyway, the USB device works great. Windows on the other hand.