I have a HP ZE4560US Laptop which won't boot. I have a lot of personal files on the hard drive that I can't afford to lose. Does anyone know of a way to connect that laptops hard drive to a Dell inspiron 570 Desktop? I purchased a 44 pin IDE to Sata adapter but when plugged in and rebooted it's not recognized. any help would be appreciated.Could be the drive has completely failed...can you feel it spinning up ? ?

                               

I use 1 of these...about 8 Bucks....laptop to IDE connector.the hard drive is STILL functioning because i can access the hard drive throu the recovery consol when the WINDOWS cd is inserted into the laptop. do you know if reinstaling windows over the existing windows (without formating the hard drive) will lose or KEEP my personal files? i'm almost certan that it's just the boot FILE was corrupted. thanks.How to Perform a Windows XP Repair InstallAlso if you CAN get to the recovery console you can try this;

Type fixboot and hit Enter...
Type fixmbr and hit enter...

Remove the Win CD and see if it boots.