Righty.

I've managed to take out my mates hard drive from her macbook so that I can pop it into my external caddy and take all her data off it so she can transfer it onto her new macbook (old one fried so it cant just be transferred normally).

However i'm worried that if I connect it to a 3.5" caddy the power requirements might be too high and could damage it.

Do I need a specific 2.5" caddy or will the 3.5" power cable just feed it what it needs?

Update:

After looking online for external caddys, I figured that it would be safe to plug in a 2.5" to a 3.5" caddy as so many of them were for both.

Nothing blew up.

But I can't access the hard drive in windows.

I've got Macdrive installed and it should be working fine but it's just simply not...

You need an adaptor. For one thing, the 3.5" ribbon won't provide power to the 2.5" drive. 3.5" drives are powered from a molex, not the ribbon.

I have a USB IDE adaptor that takes both, but it uses a different plug for each.

Adaptor: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/123998

USB: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/130517

It's a SATA drive, and it fits in my external caddy...

=/

Ah, lol. My bad. I could have sworn I read the word "ribbon" somewhere in your post

Does it show in disk management or BIOS?

Does it spin?

Basically, is it a hardware issue or a software one?
Also, are we sure the drive actually works? How did the Macbook die?

Have you tried Linux? Another Mac would be better if either of you know someone...

Unfortunately I don't know anyone I could get hold of easily who has a Mac.

And I'm not really up for installing Linux (again) just for this =/ Might do it if I have to though..

According to one of the "geniuses" at the apple store the hard drive has "failed". Excellent piece of diagnostic skill there, as I couldn't tell by the fact that the mac doesn't boot any more that the hard drive had failed. The advice was to get all the information off it and then send the macbook back in to get a new drive put in.

Can't really say more than that... It doesn't appear anywhere on my computer (whether it be BIOS or disk management) and i've even tried using it as an internal drive.

Don't install Linux, use a Live CD.

If the drive has failed, you need data recovery software, or if that doesn't work then send it off to the professionals. They'll charge you hundreds of pounds.

I'm sure it's been said before - but here it is again. BACK UP! If you only have one copy, then you've already lost it. Death, taxes and hard drive failure.

I know a few people here have experience in data recovery, but they probably don't read this section. Since this is nothing to do with Macs any more, perhaps you should move it to the PC Help forum?

Well I said i'd give it a go (they made it sound so simple!) before letting my friend send it off to be recovered as she can't really afford it at the moment. May as well turn it over to them now.

I myself back up my stuff anally - back it up weekly onto a second disk in my machine, daily onto my server (which itself is backed up daily onto another disk) and every time I build a computer (so that I don't have to reinstall everything, I just roll back to the day it was built but AFTER all the drivers/software has been installed).

And I told her to get one of those timecapsule jobbies - my knowledge of macs is limited and this seemed the obvious choice - but a couple of days later the disk broke. Ironic really.

I've no real experience, but I do know other people have had success with recovery software. As long as the drive appears as a device on the PC, then there's hope yet - you just need advice from people who know more than me. I think maybe it was Redeyes and Saspro, maybe some other guys too. Seriously - PM one of the mods and get this thread moved to the PC forum where people will see it.

You can send me the drive & I'll look at it for you.

If you can't get hold of another Mac, I'd at least run Spinrite over if (from grc.com). It is an excellent piece of software and runs at the hardware level of the drive, so it is irrelevant what schema has been used to format teh drive.