[Andrew G. N.]

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The fysical size of the hard drive wont matter at all. You are not going to mount the drive just run it for a few minutes.

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I agree that he won't have to screw the drive in to place permenately, and that physical size doesn't matter. But the IDE connector/pin size does matter. Unless he is going to plug it into another laptop, which also won't be able to read it?

My laptop, a Toshiba Qosmio, has two hard drives, so I could plug it in as a slave easily. But on how many notebooks will that be the case? Less than 1%.

So, we're talking about him needing to plug it in as a slave to a desktop's C: drive, or even as a secondary master, swapping it out for his desktop's CD drive. Which, since his laptop's drive is already set to be a master device, would be the easiest choice - unless/until he finds out that he needs to boot with a DOS boot-CD to rescue his data.

A 2.5" laptop hard drive has a different connector than a 3.5" desktop hard drive. Without having an adapter to allow the IDE cable in the desktop to plug into the laptop's hard drive, there is no reason to even open up the case. The plug won't fit, is what I'm trying to say.