slaving a laptop harddrive to a desktop PC

[jamesafnm]

easy all

having a bit of trouble with my laptop - the power socket has failed so i'm unable to either charge the battery or run it from the mains. it's still under warranty so fixing it isn't a problem, but there's some data on the laptop's hard drive that i need to recover ASAP! if anyone can give me any help on how to do this quickly and easily i would be very grateful indeed, the attempts i've made so far have been unsuccessful.

we're using one of these:

http://www.span.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=1055

with one of the pins bent out of the way to allow the connection to be made. the laptop is a fujitsu siemens amilo d series, not sure about the desktop as it's at my friends' house!

is there any way of doing this without messing around with IDE cables and whatnot? someone mentioned to me that there may be some kind of USB cradle device that i could plug the hard drive into then connect via USB.

hope this is in the right forum, i'm new round these parts!

cheers

james.

 

[Samm]

Hi James

I've used one those adapters in the past serveral times (before USB 2.5in caddies became easily available!).

I know know about yours, but the ones I used to use never seemed to have pin 1 marked on one side so be careful connecting it up.

As far as connecting it to the desktop is concerned, I would advise you do the following :

Leave the desktops primary IDE channel alone (probably have just the main hard drive connected to it)

Disconnect any drives connected to the secondary controller - normally 1 or 2 CD or CDRW drives.

Connect the laptops hard drive to the secondary. This way you don't have to worry about configuring the drive to the correct master/slave setting. Make sure bios recognises it correctly.

Boot the desktop up in safe mode. This will allow you to transfer data from one drive to the other safely.

Don't understand though, what pin do you have to bend out of the way & why?

 

[Samm]

Sorry, meant to say about 2.5inch USB caddy - yes you can get these for about £20. Simply place laptop drive inside & connect to desktop via USB port.

This would be simpler & probably safer.