How to ID which hard drive I have

[WeWilly]

The hard drive in my wife's Pavilion 17" died. How do I ID the drive to find a replacement? and is there any way to recover the data from th old one?

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@WeWilly 

Ordinarily, you would run HP Support Assitant but since the laptop probably will not turn on, you will have to remove it to physically examine it.

Any 2.5" SATA laptop drive of the same capacity will work as a replacement.

Your best bet for recovering data now is to do the following:
1) Remove the hard drive from the old PC
2) Purchase a USB-to-Hard Driver adapter kit (like the one illustrated below)

3) Connect the old drive to a working PC using that adapter
4) Try to retrieve the files and folders you want to save from the old drive and copy them to the new PC.

If this does not work, then you need to do the following:
1) Download and install this utility on a working PC http://www.majorgeeks.com/news/story/recover_data_in_3_steps_with_minitool_power_data_recovery_free_...
2) Run the data recovery utility to see what can be retrieved from the old drive.

If that tool does not find what you need, an alternative is Recuva http://www.piriform.com/recuva

And, if that does not work well, the best tool out there is this one, but only the trial version is free http://www.file-recovery.com/