A buddy asked me about this, and I told him what I THOUGHT might be the answer, but I want to make sure... Bear with me...

He has a laptop hard drive that he is trying to recover the data from. According to him, the HD can accept a regular IDE cable connection, and the power coupling, as if it were a 3.5" HD. This doesn't seem like it should be true (at least to me), since lappys operate on batteries, or thru a power converter (right???)

It's been a month since he fiddled with it, so he couldn't remember if the drive spun up at all when "powered"... I told him to 2x check and make sure the HD was properly powered (not over or under). If it would not spin up, to check the IDE cable connection.

Last thing I asked was about the drive, did it have any jumpers (I don't deal with lappys, SUE me!). He said no, so I suggested that he plug it into the Master on the cable, and his desktop HD on the slave, see if it would boot from there.

My question is, the answers I gave him I based on my own twisted logic and somewhat limited knowledge of laptop hardware issues. Did I get it right? Did I get it all bass-ackwards? Is it going to kill the HD and/or his desktop?
Any help would be MOST appreciated!

Now i dont have a lot of experience with laptops but i dont see why your ideas wouldent be right. if it doesnt boot as a master tell him to set it as secondary master (using the cables)

I don't have any experience with this subject, but I have seen converters for lappy hdds so that they can be used in a PC.

Ok, I'm at his place now, and he DOES have the converter, it's just acting squirrelly. He can't even get his desktop to SEE the lappy HDD... WTF, OVER???

Did out try making it a master on its own cable? That might do the trick.

Here is what I googled and found plenty of links... laptop hard drive to IDE converter

Laptop drives are completely compatible with PC's, you just need the converter. If the HDD isn't working with the converter, then the HDD is smoked. Nothing to do but buy a new one.

Quote: Originally Posted by pimp joose Laptop drives are completely compatible with PC's, you just need the converter. If the HDD isn't working with the converter, then the HDD is smoked. Nothing to do but buy a new one.

joose is correct, the layout of the pins on a laptop hard drive is NOT a standard 40 pin IDE so you cannot just plug it in. However you will have no problems if you buy a converter.

Thanks, guys! I was afraid of as much... Nothing left for me to do but break the bad news to him tomorrow...