Recently my laptop has stopped reading my harddrive. I closed it to put it into hybernation like I always do for the night and the next morning it wouldn't wake up. It told me that no bootable devices could be found, meaning that the hard drive doesn't exist according to the bios. I confirmed this by checking the bios and it reads as recognizing no harddrive.
I hae about 56 unique gigs of music on it as well as about 10 gigs of various games and videos and I really don't want to lose it.
I tried slaving the laptop HD to my desktop HD by means of using a different port in the harddrive bays, but the connectors were not compatible (I believe my desktop uses IDE conectors and a 4 pin power supply) the laptop harddrive normally just plugs into the side and it wouldn't fit into the IDE connector. I'd rather not lose all my data.
Is there a diagnostic someone can recommend? Can someone diagnose the problem perhaps with more information? If it's hosed is there a way I can recover the data by finding out what connector the laptop uses.
Laptop is a 4 year old del inspiron by the way, 4000 series iirc.
Thanks