Joey’s computer had a little accident recently and is due to go to hospital shortly for some serious transplant work once a donor can be located.

However before sending Joey’s netbook to the doctor we wanted to take a backup of the drive, as Acer will wipe and reinstall the drive in the repair process. Joey had a recent backup but not everything from the last few days. Oh yes, her netbook doesn’t start up.

So I figured I’d swap the hard drive out of her netbook into mine, and back it up onto a USB hard drive. It was 2 minutes work to pull the drive out of her netbook:

2 exterior screws, 1 interior screw and 4 screws on the hard drive enclosure. Quick and easy.

Mine proved a little more complicated. To get to the hard drive, I had to remove 21 screws, unclip the casing, remove the keyboard, the mainboard, the wi-fi card, a secondary circuit board, undo the screen hinge mount, and unplug 6 different cables:

It worked though: I was able to take a backup of the drive and wipe it, before reassembling both computers. Yay!

Now to see how repairable Joey’s netbook is… This bit is Acer’s job!