Quote - If you feel competent enough, you could try to open the drive case, extract the hard drive which is inside, and try it in some computer

I can drywall and tape. I can lay carpet, stretch it and seam it. I can change a picture tube in an old television. I can even take apart a vacuum motor and change the bearings. I even managed to get an engine installed into an old Ford van after it was hoisted in... granted I did have some parts left over with that... but it did work :) However, computers scare me to death. I've never seen the inside of a computer. I had an old clock radio that broke and I figured I'd try and fix it... it was a digital one. I looked at it once and tossed it in the trash and bought a big ben alarm clock, LOL A friend of mine hooked up to remote assistance and got all kinds of things updated for me. Seems I was ages behind in some things. The drive still doesn't work.. but at least I know my laptop is current. I've resigned myself to installing all the files again. I've packed up that hard drive and put it in a box in the closet. I'll format it sometime, but I'm not entrusting my files to it again. I also decided to wait on buying something else. I'd rather pay more for something better and with more space instead of buying something inferier and smaller in size than I want now. I may as well put that money towards something better. This means that my laptop will be starving for hard drive space for a couple months until I can save for a 250 gig drive. As for buying a regular hard drive and putting it into a case... I have no clue how to do that. Nor after this experience do I want to. The one I have now is an internal hard drive put into an external casing... and look what that got me... a huge waste of time and the need to reformat twice in as many days, and I still lost the bulk of my files. It seems to me that trying to make an external drive from one that isn't meant to be that is only asking for a huge amount of problems. I'm rather turned off by the idea of an external drive actually. I thought they were supposed to be great and my first try with one ended up a huge mess.

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi