Last week my laptop died, just refused to boot up, no blinky lights no beeps just nothing..
I mentioned this to a friend who frequents the computer boot sales to see if he had a dongle to let me read the old harddrive.. as while I had a backup, it wasn’t as recent as I headed it to be..*

Anyway he dismantled my old laptop to discover, that he didn’t have an adapter for an IDE laptop harddrive.
Fortunately he was going to a second hand sale, and would see what he could find.
That turned up a Dell Inspiron 4100, that has the same kind of harddrive, and similar internals, so that was purchased so that things could be recovered.  Harddrive was inserted and debian has done an amazing job of recogniseing everything and booting up without any errors.

Brilliant I am saved.. Alas things are not that easy..
The transplant machine, only has 128gb of RAM, so is running like a dead dog, it also has no WiFi, which is possibly a good thing as I doubt that it has the power to be able to run such trickery.

So the process of rescuing my data is going to take forever, and then I will be taking both Laptops to the dump.
And then going shopping for something new and wizzy, which might be a mac, or a hackintosh.

* This is a fail Mr Russ you should be more organised.