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.
February 12th, 2007 at 7:34 am
Hey CJ,
Do you think the 1-chip laptop drive to desktop drive adapter I mentioned before, will work or will I have a posible power problem?
thanks, Rob
February 11th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
THE J-Man,
I think you can borrow the power cable from the CD-Rom drive. You don’t need the CD-Rom drive to transfer files from one hard drive to another. Unplug the power cable from the optical drive and use it for the hard dive adapter.
February 10th, 2007 at 11:06 am
Hi,
I have a laptop hard drive which has some important files on it, which I want to transfer over to my Desktop. It’s a pretty old Dell Dimension 4100. I have the adapter and can connect the two IDE ends up, but can’t find anywhere to plug the power cable into!
any ideas where on the computer this would be? would it be within the PSU?
Thanks,
February 6th, 2007 at 6:40 am
So is that a “Don’t worry about the 5-volt power requirement, all IDE drives use the same voltage.” or “I use one of those chips, too.”? Rob
February 5th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
Rob,
My adapter doesn’t look fancy either but it works.
February 2nd, 2007 at 9:23 am
Hi,
I found an adapter for connecting a laptop HD to my desktop on ebay, that is all on one board. I’ll send you a picture if you reply. My question is, will this work, or is it a poor setup, possibly because of the power connector (looks like it might be a passthru, nothing to force 5 volts)?
thanks, Rob
January 18th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Jon,
If the drive is spinning you can hear or feel it if you touch the drive.
Do not connect the notebook drive to the IDE cable with other device attached. The notebook hard drive has to be the only device on the ribbon cable/IDE channel. If you have an HDD or optical drives connected to the IDE2 on your PC, unplug them and connect the laptop HDD to this channel.
You cannot do that, it’s not plug-n-play device. You have to boot the computer with the laptop hard drive already attached to it.
January 16th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
I have a HD from a Toshiba Satellite that i am trying to connect to my (once was) Dell PC to retrieve any remaining files from a bad crash. The drive seems to be spinning, although this could be my imagination, but I continue to receive an error that my cpu will not boot. it is looking for a either a cd-rom or floppy boot disk. I get the same results when there is no power to the drive but it is still connected via IDE. When i tried to connect the HD after i had booted, my screen screen froze along with the rest of my computer. It seems that my computer is not detecting my master hard drive when this HD is connected, even if it is already running. Do i have the connection wrong? is there something i have to do with my BIOS? is this hard drive bad? any guidance would be greatly appreciated.
December 21st, 2006 at 5:51 pm
For those who may not know/or encountered these problems… If it applies to you, please try these things out.
My situation… The DJ that is doing my wedding has a laptop hard drive that not even Best Buy Computer help center could fix. They even charged his $60 for nothing. They tried everything.
His OS was shot and it was looking really grim for his sake. The DJ wanted to know If I could rip all the music he had on it and I gave it a shot.
He told me this and I said I would take a look at it. I found this device and bought it. Tried hooking it up on my desktop as the Master Drive and as a Slave drive hoping I could use a boot CD loaded with MISC tools to salvage whats on there. Nothing was working.
So I tried to tweak the Desktop system and ultimately it worked. The laptop hard drive worked with the following steps. Mostly Suggestion 2 was the winner here. Suggestion 1 is something that you may not have known to do. Especially when this device had no instructions with it. This website page help ALOT with the visualizations/steps!!
1) I had to bend back one pin on the adapter to accommodate the Desktops IDE cable. So feel free to do so.
2) I also had to disable the UDMA in the CMOS for this thing to recognize.
December 16th, 2006 at 11:43 pm
my hard disk shows hardware installation error whenver i connect it using adapter.it shows the same error when used with usb caisng.