Help,

I have an older HP laptop that was working just fine.  The battery I have for it has long since lost its ability to recharge so I use the powercord to use it.  Today by accident the powercord box fell off the table and yanked itself out of the back of the laptop.  The laptop shutoff and now will not restart or respond at all.  My guess is that some sort of surge happened. I tried a different powercord from another laptop and it still will not start.

Can anyone help me?  I need to get some documents and other items off that I had not backed up on an external drive yet.

More than likely the internal power source may of disconnected from the outer connector to receive power.

You may have to bring to a technician and have them open it up, to check that cable connector internally.

The NEX in Yokosuka was selling external housings for hard drives for about $25 or $30. Also the PC Depot near Yokosuka sells cables that can be used to hook up an internal hard drive as an external hard drive. If the problem is with the computer's hardware and not a crashed drive you can pull the hard drive out and use it as an external drive. I have two HP laptops and it only take two screws to remove the hard drive. One of mine had the motherboard die, and I was able to recover all my info. If you search online for how to remove your hard drive (check HP's website - it was usefull for me) you should find somebody has posted a step by step tutorial about how to do it.

Yes you can also do what gaijin just recommended. I have had to do this with several External Hardrives when the power source stopped working. I took it apart completely, bought a power source adapater, and its still an external hard drive, but its jerry rigged. Still I was able to recover all the data which is the most important part.

(pardon me if I get over detailed here, it's a slow morning and the coffee hasn't hit yet)

I just want to ... well.. agree with what both Adam and gaijin said.

First - it's also possible that the power prong in the laptop itself is what is damaged. It will still take a tech to fix, but it's possible to do so.

Second - External hard drive bays / enclosures come in up 4 basic varieties depending on two options - generally speaking.
The first is the size of the harddrive. Rated either as a 3.5" for typical PC harddrives, or 2.5" for the slimmer and smaller laptop harddrives.

Depending on the type of drive (see below) with enough duct tape you could put a 2.5" into a 3.5" enclosure, there's no technical reason it won't work but for simplicity's sake you should probably look for a unit that specifically says it handles 2.5" size drives.

A comparison can be seen from the links below (these are not product endorsements, just the first items with decent pics that I found on Newegg). You might want to look at the various pictures below the main one to get a feel for the size and the cables that typically come with each type.
2.5" : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...6817816001
3.5" : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...6817366009

The second main differentiation is in they types of pins the harddrive uses to plug into the motherboard. This might be a little tricker. The older style was called IDE (or PATA) and looks like two rows of pins in the back. The newer one is called SATA and is distinctly different.

IDE pic: http://bixnet.net/images/NBHD-IDE-Connector.jpg
SATA pic : http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_hHALaj5JXZg/SxjHWy72gJI/AAAAAAAAAlI/e00_t9Koz-U/s400/laptop-sata-hard-drive.jpg

If you don't have the technical documentation for your laptop you will probably want to pull the harddrive out first and verify the type of pin out it's using before purchasing an enclosure. Being an HP you may have some luck getting the specs of the laptop from the HP website, but since regardless of what happens the drive has to pop out you might as well as start there.

Pop the drive into the enclosure and it's just another USB device like your existing external.