Laptop troubleshooting and hard drive recovery help needed

[UberTiger]

Hey all,

My housemates lappy just dies. Plug it in, power port light turns on. Try to turn it on, it gets juice for about 1 second and then dies. Screen never comes on.

Apparently last night it all froze up. Had to do a hard shut down.

My first priority it to try and recover the data as it's got her dissertation on it. It looks like it's got an old IDE hard drive in it. Seagate Momentus 5400.3 (HP 418267-002)

It's got thin flat pins (not round normal pins) that slide into the connector on the mobo. Is there any way to connect this to my desktop as I don't have another laptop with an IDE connection in the house?

Also other trouble shooting tips for the lappy itself?

Thanks!

Edit: Hard drive looks like this, is a connector I can use to connect it to my desktop?

Edit 2:

Nevermind, I think I'm an idiot. Looks like that's an adapter and the HDD is actually SATA! Happydays.

 

[Dano]

Nevermind, I think I'm an idiot. Looks like that's an adapter and the HDD is actually SATA! Happydays.

Also worth unplugging the laptop from the mains, removing the battery and then pressing the 'On' button afew times, plug it back in and try to start it again.

 

[unp|dissy]

If you need recovery and get the disk to spin try the knoppix linux live cd.