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.
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September 7th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
It doesn’t work for me ..
I have an old laptop (Thinkpad 760ED) that has no boot device (no floppy, old non-booting CD drive, an HD with corrupt NTFS). I took the HD out of the caddy and connected it to a similar adapter, plugged in the IDE, the power cable – and nothing. It isn’t spinning.
I made sure I didn’t damage it, and it’s fine, spins very well wihle its back in the laptop.
What can be the problem here ?
August 13th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
[...] To start the recovery process you have to place a recovery media inside the CD/DVD drive and make the laptop boot from the drive. After that you follow the wizard to finish up recovery. Before you reload the laptop back to factory default, you have to back up any important data from the hard drive because it would be erased and reformatted. To access the data, you can remove the hard drive and connect it to any working desktop PC using a USB hard drive enclosure (slower data transfer) or laptop IDE hard drive adapter (more advanced but faster data transer). [...]
July 26th, 2006 at 9:23 pm
Julie,
It’s still hard to determine with link in the chain is bad. It could be a bad hard drive or a bad enclosure. If you have another laptop with a good working hard drive, you can remove it from the laptop and install into the enclosure. After that connect to a working computer. If the hard drive is still not recognized, then most likely the enclosure is defective.
July 26th, 2006 at 10:52 am
OK. Tried the same enclosure with 2 different laptops. New results for both – the USB is acknowledged as a mass storage device, but I can’t find a way to browse it. It doesn’t show up as a drive except on the system hardware list.
July 25th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
I would try to connect the USB enclosure to another working computer and see what happens. If you experience the same problem, then it’s possible that the enclosure is not working right. I have one of those cheap enclosures. My home PC doesn’t want work with the enclosure attached, I’m getting BSOD. But my laptop works fine with the same enclosure. My second (more expensive enclosure works fine with both computers). There shouldn’t be any issues with connecting an USB enclosure to a computer, unless you have some strange problems with the hard drive itself or your enclosure is defective.
July 25th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
Tried that. It still tries to re-boot. Also tried shutting down and having the USB attached when I power up. The desk-top boots fine, then as soon as I try to view the USB drive, it tries to reboot.
July 25th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
Start your computer without the USB HD enclosure attached to it. When it boots to the desktop, connect the enclosure. It should be detected by the OS automatically and you can access the HD inside the enclosure as a regular HDD though My Computer.
July 25th, 2006 at 2:08 pm
I bought an adaptec USB HD enclosure kit for this purpose, but when I plug the drive in to the USB, windows tries to boot from the USB-connected drive, which causes my desktop system to crash. How can I attach the drive without it trying to boot windows?
June 28th, 2006 at 11:42 am
Matty,
I think it’s possible that the laptop hard drive is bad itself. If the drive is spinning but not detected by the OS, most likely the laptop hard drive controller board is bad. That’s would be my first guess. If the hard drive controller board is bad, I don’t think that you would be able to get any data from the drive at home.
June 27th, 2006 at 9:08 pm
I have an emachines e5310 which i’m sending back to the company for repair (overheating problems are abundant).
I bought an IDE adapter to get the data of my laptop hard drive but when I boot it up I get an error message that says there is a problem and i need to boot up using a boot cd.
i tried using my USB enclosure along with the adapter to connect the hard drive but it doesn’t detect the hard drive. I hear the hard drive spinning…. any ideas what the problem could be?