I have a Dell M1210 that is approximately 5 years old. I recently was having issues with the power cord not being recognized (which is a problem with this series). I purchased a new, genuine, Dell power adapter and it still not working properly. While it was working off of ac power it was not charging the battery. Now it will not work at all, and I have two dead batteries. Normally, I would toss this machine and extract files from the hard drive via an Apricorn usb Drivewire, but I have a bios password on the hard drive and I suspect that this is why it is not showing up in My Computer.(although it does show up in device manager). As an alternate, I tried a similar usb device from Vantec, but it is still the same issue. I was however able to clone this hard drive to a Seagate portable drive, and I still can't access any data. (it will not show up in My Computer) My questions are:
1. Would the bios password on the hard drive keep me from getting files off of it on a different computer
2. Is there a way to charge the battery manually to give me enough time to remove password in bios
3. Can a data restoration service get files off of it.
4. If a new motherboard was installed, would the password protected hard drive still be recognized
My option so far is to purchase a used M1210 from Craigslist and use the charged battery to get data off of it.
Thank you,
