To connect a laptop hard drive to a desktop computer you have to use a Laptop IDE Hard Drive Adapter. You can easily find this adapter on the Internet for $10-$15. This adapter is very handy if you want to scan a laptop hard drive for viruses and spyware using antivirus software installed on a desktop PC, transfer data from a laptop hard drive to a desktop computer or create a ghost image from one hard drive to another. I also use this adapter if a laptop hard drive has failed and I have to recover data from it.
When you connect a laptop IDE adapter, a desktop IDE cable and a laptop hard drive to each other, make sure to connect pin 1 on the hard drive, pin 1 on the desktop IDE cable to pin 1 on the adapter. On a desktop IDE cable the side painted in red goes to pin 1.
On a laptop hard drive there are 2 groups of pins. One group has 43 pins and the other has 4 pins. The pin 1 is located on the side closer to the group of 4 pins.
After you’ve assembled everything together, connect the IDE cable to a desktop PC. Connect it to a free IDE connector on the system board. When you start the computer, you should see the laptop drive in BIOS and in Windows. You can treat this drive as a regular hard drive.
April 30th, 2009 at 4:53 am
No. The notebook drive is IDE and the desktop drive is SATA. I can boot to the XP CD and go through the installation, but that is not what I want to do with this drive. I just want to boot into XP from the desktop’s SATA drive and see what’s on the notebook drive.
April 29th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Steve,
I assume your notebook hard drive is the SATA drive you are trying to boot from? That’s wrong.
You have to boot from a regular hard drive and if there is nothing wrong with your notebook drive it will appear in My Computer.