old ass laptops

I was asked to process(data removal and pull cmos stats ie hard drive size proc speed and ram info) 45 laptops of differing manufacture. Being all vendor specific I ran into a few problems. Some had no A drives, some had no CDROMs or any external drives to plug in. Most had no power supplies and many had broken displays. I used a universal adapter, some old power supplies that I kept for a rainy day and a laptop hard drive cage with a usb connector to reformat drives that I had no way of accessing except physically removing them from the notebooks. Here is my question....Does anyone out there know of a universal a drive that is plug and play regardless if there is an OS on the machine or not? If so, does it have the option of parallel, usb or pcmcia connectivity? Is there one that has all three input possibilities? This would save me from having to remove 2-30 [-peep-] pea size screws from all sorts of exciting door stops(notebooks) in the future.

trocar1