On 19/01/2016 20:15, Chris B wrote:
Any help would be appreciated with regard to the following.



(otherwise I guess its take the HD out of the laptop and mount it as an
extra disk into one of my desktop machines)

You can get for a few pounds on eBay an adaptor which plugs into any IDE
or SATA drive and gives you a USB connection; quicker and less fiddle
than opening up another machine and normally the first thing I try in
cases like this (after what you have already done).