SDD causing BIOS to freeze on boot

I have a Dell Latitude laptop with a 120GB SDD (part number CSSD-F120GB2) as the primary storage device. Recently the laptop froze up and didn't want to reboot ... it stops up during BIOS boot with the progress bar stuck under the E in "DELL". After a lot of waiting eventually it says "no boot device". Pressing F12 and waiting a lot I eventually get to the diagnostics, and it reports "Error Code 0150

Error Code 2000-0150 - No Hard Drive detected". Taking out the SSD,

the laptop is quick at giving the "no boot device detected" error. I tried putting the SDD into a Thinkpad T60, and it says "no disk present".

The laptop supplier is willing to replace the SDD, but they take no responsibility for the data on the disk ... when I send the SDD away, the data is irreversibly lost. I do have some data on the disk that wasn't backed up - nothing extremely important, but still - I'd like to know if there is any chance to recover the data from the disk.

Sounds like the only chance you may have is to boot to a removeable disc containing an operating system such as "Parted Magic". It may be possible to recover data from the drive, and copy it to a USB drive.

Failing that, you may alternatively attempt to install the driving in another PC as a secondary drive, and see if it can be found that way. If the file system has become corrupt, a program such as "Recuva" may help you reclaim the data.

There are no guaranties that anything will work. YMMV.

No luck there ... the disk doesn't work for the BIOS and is not visible for the OS. I created a Ubuntu USB boot stick to test. The USB stick itself comes up as /dev/sda, and there are no other devices available.

Luckily our "backup policy" for photos have saved us - duplicate them all over the place. Anyway, by now I've signed up at Amazon S3 and working on improved backup routines.