DVD Burner and Hard Drive Enclosues

[Sethland]

My HP dv6233se notebook died on me a couple of weeks ago (turns on for a split second then turns off right away...no leads appear at all) and I'm about to buy another HP notebook very soon.  However, I would like to rescue my 120 gb internal hard drive and dvd burner.  Are there any apprpriate enclosures that I can buy so I can salvage these working parts?  I tried to buy 4 different 2.5" SATA enclosures for the hard drive but none of them fit at all. As far as I'm concern, I thought I would just simply drop the hard drive into the enclosure and it's ready to go but no such luck.  Please help.

[Huffer]

You just need to remove the hardware wrapping around the hard drive by that I mean the caddy and strip it down to the bare drive. Also remove the plastic adapter that goes over the standard SATA connectors. Then you can drop the drive into a 2.5 inch SATA adapter (make sure it is SATA and not PATA). As far as the optical drive, external caddies for laptop optical drives are much rarer. The interface on your DVD burner is called 50 pin mini-ide and they do make relatively cheap adapters that connect to the mini-ide connection and allow you to plug it into an IDE cable on a desktop. But that makes kind of an awkward device and not a nice compact external drive. 

Adapter

[Sethland]

Hi Huffer,

Thanks for your prompt reply.  It's greatly appreciated.  However, i'm trying to dissect your recommended steps on how to encased my notebook hard drive with an external enclosure but I must say that I don't understand what you meant about the "caddy" and the "hardware wrapping." Furthermore, the plastic adapter that goes over the standard SATA connectors (is it the black rectangular thing over the gold connectors?), do I just yank that of?  My apology for sounding so novice about this but because I am.  Kindly reply to me once again.  Thanks so much.