Hey guys, first post!
I'm doing IT and tech support at an American study abroad program in Italy and have my first case of a fried computer, a Dell Vostro 220s with what I believe to be a fried graphics controller. The computer (to a certain extent) boots up and I can nominally get into the boot menu, although I can't see anything other than a blue screen with streaky white lines because of the aforementioned graphics controller. My original plan was to pop it open, pirate a compatible video card from another tower lying around, and voilĂ !
But no. The graphics controller is integrated. Since there are said computers lying around, though, my plan is just to pull the data off the hard drive of the wounded soldier, fire one up, and throw the data on there. The problem is that I really have no idea how to go about pulling the data off the HD, which is a SATA-300, and putting it back on. I assume that it would involve pulling out the HD and hooking it up to the other machine, but I'm not entirely sure about the process or the tools needed to carry it out. Any help would be greatly appreciated -- websites and web servers I can do, but I'm still learning about many other things.
Thanks in advance for any help.