Hello, OP here yet again
Sorry about the delay between posts, I was away for a week. Anyway, here's the next chapter in the saga...I unscrewed and removed the hard drive from the broken laptop and put it into the enclosure and screwed it all together, making sure to follow the instructions closely. After that was done I plugged the USB cord into the enclosure on one end and into a different, working laptop on the other end. After that I plugged in the black power cord into the enclosure and then into another USB slot on the laptop. The blue light on the enclosure came on and made a little beeping sound and that was it. I waited about 2 minutes but there was no sign from the laptop at all that anything had been plugged in or any new drive had been recognized. I put my ear to the enclosure and heard whirs and clicks from inside but there was still no new drive recognized on the computer like there would be if you inserted a USB flash drive or an external HD into the USB port. I restarted the laptop, unplugged the enclosure from the laptop, plugged it back in, still nothing. The blue light went off when I unplugged it and went back on it when I plugged it back in again and I could hear whir noises from the enclosure still but the laptop didn't recognize anything at all. Here are pictures of the enclosure plugged into the working laptop with the blue power light on:



Maybe someone recognizes something wrong with that setup, but as far as I can tell I did everything as I was supposed to and followed the enclosure's instructions to the letter. I also tried plugging the enclosure into my desktop computer (also has XP) to the same result; the blue power light came on but the computer didn't recognize anything at all.

So, any advice for what to do now or any insight into why this is happening?
Thanks as always!

OP here again, bumping for help on what to do next

I think the best first step...

Rather then trying to troubleshoot why it's not recognized in the enclosure, i think your first priority is being able to recover your data.

I suggest placing the drive back into the computer (where we know it at least spins and gets read). And i offer the same advice as earlier in the thread. See [post=766270]How to recover your folders/files when Windows won’t boot[/post]. Burn a Knoppix CD and boot into Knoppix. Then copy/paste your personal data to back it up to a USB drive. and THEN you can proceed to get the darned drive fixed and bootable again.

OP here again; it's been several months since my last post but I'm still dealing with this same problem...there's data on the laptop I'd like to retrieve and I still have found no way of doing so.
I did burn a Knoppix CD and inserted it into my laptop but it didn't seem to make any difference and the machine just looped the boot sequence as usual without giving any hint that it recognized the CD.
Anything else I can do?

I know we've PM'ed but am glad you re-posted here as i'd forgotten much of the earlier parts of the thread and what you've been through already by now. Yikes!

From your PM's it sounds like you've by now managed to download the Knoppix file correctly and burned it as an image. If your laptop continues to fail to recognize it as bootable I suggest you go try it on a friend's computer you know is working and recognizing bootable CDs so you can test it to know for sure if it;s bootable or not.

ALSO.... Have you tried hitting ESC on power up and during the HP flash screen? I think this should take you a screen that prompts you for the boot device where you can select the CD.

I borrowed a friend's laptop (also Windows XP) and used the same Knoppix CD in his laptop as I did in mine and when I turned his on it booted into Knoppix without a hitch. I then ejected the very same CD, put it into my laptop and turned it on and nothing at all. Just the looping boot sequence as usual.

I did hit Esc and it gave me four options, one of which was something about ATAPI CD-ROM. I selected that option and hit enter but all it did was bring me back to the Windows XP loading screen, which then in turn looped me back to the HP screen and so on...it wasn't any different than if I had done nothing at all. For good measure I tried the other 3 options it gave me after hitting the Esc key as well, but all to the same result.

So the Knoppix CD itself works, I know that much...but getting it to work in my laptop is another story.

When you hit ESC and get the boot menu, does your computer give the option to boot from USB?

If you boot into Knoppix on friend's PC, run it. You'll find an option on the Knoppix menu to create a bootable USB flash drive. Then try booting from the USB flash drive on your PC

/* edit */
btw.. ATAPI CD-ROM would be your CD drive. Sounds like the drive or cable has failed (if you're lucky, you can try cleaning the lense)

Wow. Again. As you've really been through the grinder with this problem.

I saw some old info you had sent me (sorry, sometimes i forget all the details for all the specific threads/posts i've read/skimmed through on these forums). And it seems booting from USB isn't an option on your laptop

So try unlatching and sliding out/ removing the CD player from the laptop. Then firmly slide it back in (with one finger on each side of the faceplate to apply even pressure.) If lucky, it might just need to be reseated to establish good contact. Also try cleaning the lens.

If this still fails, let me know. we can talk about trying the external enclosure again. (It's probably not worth buying a new CD drive to try unless you can find one for cheap or you can return it and get your $$ refunded if it doesn't help.)

I tried unlatching and sliding out the CD player, taking the Knoppix CD out, cleaning the lens and then putting the Knoppix CD back in and sliding the CD player firmly back in but unfortunately this didn't seem to do anything. Just more of the same looping the boot sequence and no apparent recognition of the CD at all.

So what's the next step?

Slide the drive out of your computer again. What make/model drive is it?

Look at the drive pins. I'm guessing no pins are jumpered? (if any pins are jumpered with a plastic cover, remove it and expose all pins)

Slide it into your USB enclosure. When you plug the USB drive into the computer do you at least hear the USB "ding-dong" sound when you connect?

under Safe Mode, did you try using MSCONFIG to disable as much as possible of the Startups?

I unscrewed and removed the HD from the laptop once more and put it into the enclosure to see if it would make the ding-dong noise when I plugged it into the working computer and miraculously when I plugged it in the machine recognized it; a separate drive came up and inside were all my folders and files from the old laptop. I have no idea what was different this time that caused it to work when it never would before, but I guess something finally just clicked into place so that it was recognized.

I'm now in the process of moving all the contents of the drive (100GB+ worth) onto an external before the old HD decides to die on me again. Let's hope it successfully finishes backing everything up, and afterward who knows, maybe if I put the HD back into the old laptop again it'll work and start-up since something apparently changed for it to be recognized with the enclosure when it didn't used to be.

I'll post back with updates/results!

YYYYYEEEEEAAAAAA!!! :grinthumb

But given all the problems you've had up to now with your laptop hardware: problems whether boot from HD or CD. And HD not working in the enclosure before, i'd be wary. So be sure to run diagnostics on the drive if not replace it. And find out what's wrong with that CD drive as well. Or just use the laptop for web browsing etc. (i.e. don't rely on it again).

In any event, am very glad to hear you could finally recover all your data

I got around to putting the HD back into the laptop and starting up the laptop again but unfortunately it's back to the looping boot sequence as usual.

At least now I have everything backed up on an external drive, though.

However, it's pretty time consuming to sort through over 100 gigs of files from a span of 5 years in a computer folder, file by file, deciding which are important and which can be deleted, so if anyone has any ideas about how I can get the laptop to get past that looping boot sequence and successfully boot up to the desktop again I'd love to hear them!