Ok, here's the situation. The power cable connection on my laptop has a little pin on the inside, and the sucker broke off inside. I managed to get the case of the laptop apart enough to get the pieces out but i cannot get the entire thing apart to resolder a new connector or something inside at this time.

My other option is to charge the now-dead battery and get my data off the thing in the 2-3 hours of battery life i may have. How do i go about doing this without buying an expensive battery charger? The contact pins of the battery look a little hard to get to but i do believe i could get a wire or two in there.

Is there a site out there which lists these types of batteries and which contacts i could use to charge the thing? Could i run wires from the charging cable to these contacts or would there be an internal stepping-down of voltage for charging that shouldnt be bypassed?

If this thread belongs in T&T please move. I'll check the thread on my PSP from home and i wont be able to reply really until tomorrow (library time limits).

Laptop is an Acer Aspire POS and the battery is a Panasonic.

Insert a small spring into the charger plug. It should make contact with what's left of the pin inside the connector. Don't try to directly charge the battery.

^The mount for the pin is actually what broke, the plastic bit holding the pin and all. I'm not sure which way it's oriented and how it was attatched to the board or that'd be a grand idea.

Take the battery apart. It should have a couple of Li-Ion cells in there. Figure out where is the hottest and ground leads and put a voltage on them with some wires from a DC power supply and plug it back into the computer.

It is also possible to buy an adaptor for laptop IDE drives that fit into standard IDE slots so you can plug it directly into a desktop.

hdd retretrival was my next idea but USB drive transfer is preferable. id like to keep this comp usable if possible. How do i transfer data?