My Toshiba TE2100 finally bid farewell to normal life last night.
Orange light flashing, boots for 2 mins sometimes and then dies.... so I'm assuming it is the power board connection.
I'm ok with saying 'au revoir' to the laptop - it has given a lot of service - but am kicking myself that my last backup was a month ago and I have a program that I downloaded (freeware) ages ago that is incredibly useful but the download website has gone....

Visiting 3 computer shops today got me three different solutions to my 'retrieving data from Hard Drive query'
The one I most like was "buy Hard Disk Enclosure and plug old hard drive into new computer and transfer stuff across" cost of $30!
or
"We can do it for $60 if you buy a laptop from us"
or
"$300 to retrieve all data"

Will the enclosure idea work? (it seems so simple)
I will try disassembling the TE2100 and resetting the power board but only have girl tool kit so not sure how successful that will be..... (also have a tendency to be left with 'extra' screws when I disassemble/re-assemble anything)

Thanks in advance

"Orange light flashing, boots for 2 mins sometimes and then dies.... so I'm assuming it is the power board connection."

If you can get into your BIOS, turn off the power management.
It's been a few years, but I had a Toshiba that wouldn't boot completely and when I turned off the power mgt, it worked fine - then the battery died and wouldn't hold a charge. But that 's another story.

AS far as the hard drive enclosure is concerened. I'm unfamiliar with your machine, but if you can remove the hard drive and it's functional, and yo can plug it in to a new machine, then yes it will work. I've done that with desktops without an enclosure. I just plugged the disk drive in and copied everything off of it that I wanted.

Thanks
I tried taking it apart last night and can get the hard drive out so I'll get a casing today and fingers crossed that that works....