I have a laptop that won't boot. It appears to be a power problem ... laptop auto-turns-off within about 10 seconds of pressing the power button (with power buttons lighted temporarily and no display with or without external monitor). I've followed the dell troubleshooting guide which suggested reseating the memory modules and the hard drives, but that didn't help.

Before trying to have the laptop serviced, I wanted to get some data off off the hard drive. I bought a thermaltake blacX enclosure, intending to use this to both use to retrieve the drive data with, and then later use as external storage.

Following the instructions (insert cables, insert drive power on) goes fine, and Windows 7 on another laptop installs the device driver software. However, no drive letter shows up in 'Computer'.

Under Computer->manage->storage I see the drive is there, and there's an option to "initialize" the drive. The Windows "initialize" dialog gives me the option to pick between "MBR" and "GPT" partitioning, which sounds like a good way to destroy the data on the drive.

I'm thinking that I've purchased the wrong device for the job (or that my old drive is damaged). The old drive to recover info from is a Western Digital 500G/7200rpm SATA drive if that is relavent. Both the original laptop and the one I'm using for recovery are running Windows 7.

Does anybody have experience with using a blacX enclosure to recover data off an already formatted drive?