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.
In the next post I explain how to access data using an external USB enclosure.
If you find this article useful, please consider making a donation to the author. Thank you!
August 24th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Hi everyone,I have a laptop computer that I purchased, the laptop was given to my son he used for a few months and created a password to sing in, now I have the laptop back, but he does not remenber the password, is there a free program that I can used to recover the password he had.
Thanks,
Jose
July 15th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
since when did SATA drives become an irregular hard drive? As long as the drive has an OS you can boot to it. I would just boot via the normal primary and access the other drive as a slave or secondary primary drive. Then you can view the contents.
July 14th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
So… I have a HDD out of my Lenovo T60. The drive seems to have failed, but I am not posative that is what the deal is. I have tried to hook into a desktop via mainboard SATA connectors and everything seems fine. Drivers are installed, device is working properly, and XP gives it a new drive letter and recognizes it as an alternate drive in my computer. When I try to open the drive XP tells me it isnt formatted…..it was the primary in my laptop, so it is formatted and has an OS on it… any ideas???
I really need the files on this drive. Will a USB adapter do the trick, or is this drive toast and I am SOL?
thanks guys.
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.
April 29th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
I tried to configure the system to boot to my SATA drive so I could look at the contents of the notebook HDD. It just gets stuck in a loop with the F8 screen asking how I want to boot, I chose, it restarts and goes back to the F8 screen. Any suggestions?
March 5th, 2009 at 7:29 am
i’m trying to take files from my old laptop hard drives and download them on my new laptop what cord do i need. Please help
February 17th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
I have a hitachi travelstar and although my PII motherboard recognizes the drive, it will not boot to it.
I know the hard drive works because I tested it on a newer motherboard & it booted to the O.S. no problem.
Any ideas on what to do / try?
December 27th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Also have a Hitachi Travelstar with a strange pin config. It seems to have 44 pins, but is not the typical two row male pin config. This is not a SATA, it is definitely an ATA/IDE, but pins are more like female. Model # is HTS541080G9AT00. Can someone suggest an adapter?
Thanks.
December 26th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
I have an acer aspirer 3680 with 80gb HD running xp, and I have a desktop running windows 98. I was just wondering if it was possible for me to do this, and if so do I just plug the cord into the motherboard? Thank you.