found out today that he never got a replacement laptop, and that he was told by a company that the laptop was unfixable ..or the cost to fix would be greater than the laptop

 

^ Yup, thought so (about the last part)

most in store HD enclosures are ridiculously expensive imo

 

If it was really dropped while it was plugged in (and your friend didn't leave any other details out), I've seen many notebooks with broken power connectors from an impact. If you plug in the notebook, move the power cord attached to the notebook around to see if it seems loose. While its plugged in, try moving the power cord attached to the back of the notebook up/down/left/right for a few seconds at a time while watching the battery recharging light, but not too hard, you don't want to break the connector off the main circuit board. If you do manage to get power by holding at an angle, try hooking up to a desktop computer monitor and turning it on.

Notebook motherboards and screens can be expensive, especially on Sony models. Most motherboards are time consuming to replace as well. In most cases, if the notebook is out of warranty, its less expensive to purchase a new notebook than to fix it.

As for data recovery. You'll first need to figure out if its an Ide or Sata hard drive before purchasing a enclosure or usb dock. Or purchase a USB adapter with both IDE and SATA connectors. I have used with no problems, there are plenty of options out there.

If you cannot get the notebook to work, you can try parting it out (dvd drive, memory, wireless card, power brick, the bad notebook shell itself, etc.) on ebay, craiglist, etc.

 

tried pluging it in and moving the cord but got nothing

 

if you know anyone who has a mac also, try starting it up in target disk mode

you hook up both computer to each other thru firewire, yours off, the other one on, then turn yours on and as soon as you hear then "ding" hold down T, then you will see the firewire logo on the screen and it will mount your hardrive to the other computer, hope this helps and its not too late, i dont check this section as much as i would like to

 

Thanks! That's actually the exact same thing that my friend who used to work at Apple told me to do... I just haven't tried that yet. I ordered that SATA hard drive dock thing so I should receive it in a few days. If that doesn't work for whatever reason, I will probably need to try the target disk mode. Thanks again for the advice! I'll PM you if I have any problems with it

 

had it plugged in yesterday for maybe an hour and a half, only thing that happened was the battery was real warm... i tried to open it up to remove the hard drive but it gave me too much trouble

 

why not just tell him to buy a new laptop since that seems like what is going to be necessary.. then he can either just swap the harddrive from the broken laptop into the new one, see if it works and be done with it and have a backup harddrive should this one fail.. or buy an external harddrive connector as others have suggested and load the data off

 

if he swaps the hardrive into another computer it can fail to boot due to the hardware differences. best bet is hard drive enclose, then you can use that as a backup drive as well.

 

^ ah I'm no laptop guru.. just work on desktops so didn't think of that.