Laptop HDD- PC

[RWD3]

Hey all, I have an averatec laptop that I used to use until i broke the connector to the power supply off of the mother board when my friend droped it. Now I use my pc.

I dont really care for the laptop seeing as how I can't use it, but I was wondering how I can get the information off of that hard drive and put it onto my pc...I have maybe a half hour left of battery life before it dies forever and I don't think I would be able to network it and I don't even think I remeber the login password.

So I was wondering if there is any way I can take the harddrive out of the laptop and add it as a second harddrive for my pc to extract and use the information on that hard drive. Is there any special wires I need to buy?

[Gecko]

You will need a
Take out the laptop drive and connect it to the converter and then connect your IDE cable and power connector.
It will read just like it was another IDE drive.

[RWD3]

Thanks alot gecko...that was quick...lol.....
Cheap too, I am ordering now.
Is there anything else I should know, my xp will recongize the drive after I install it?

[Kestrel]

[RWD3]

thanks Krestrel for the info.
yeah I didnt really want to pay much and I really have no reason for the portability of a laptop hard drive, but one question. I was messing around with linux at the time so idk if I might have had a partition on it..will that effect anything?

[Gecko]

It shouldn't make any difference windows will just not see that partition.

[icecube]

Be very carefull and follow the instructions on hooking this adapter up. You hook it up backwards and you will smoke the drive. Smoke is the right word. Align the (1) pin on the adapter with the (1) pin on the drive and you should be ok.

Another issue that comes to mind, the drive designator clips for master and slave are probably absent--they are small and hard to come by. So what you do is hook it up to the second IDE cable and run it as a secondary master.

[RWD3]

OK thanks for the important info icecube... and arn't those little clips called jumpers?..well anyway I have a few lying around because I have been messing around with computers and taking any computers that any other kids in my school and messing around so I have a few from cd drives, and other hard drives. So I will set the jumper to slave and put it on the same IDE cable just in the slave position and it will work right?...

Also I got another question. When I plug this harddrive In I will be able to access every thing on it.

So if I am getting this correctly, If I wanted to steal someones Information and didn't know their password to log into windows, I just steal their harddrive and put it in mine set up as slave and I can acess all their information?

Because thats pretty much what I am doing. except its my laptop. and it doesn't even have any battery power.


Oh I am sorry guys one more question:
I was looking at my laptop and thought....the only thing I can use out of it is the harddrive, but what about the screen?... is there anyway to splice the screens wires over to VGA* and If I would need to do the same for a poew hook up. because it is a perfectly goot 14'' flat screen...

*Don't Laugh at me I never learned what the connection for the monitor is called.. the blue connector is VGA right? idk I am just guessing.

[liljim]

[Kestrel]

yes.. it is surprisingly easy to get someone's information off their drive without knowing their password.. you don't even need to take the drive out to do it.. so many DOS utilities around nowadays to mount NTFS drives.. and supporting USB Mass Storage.. that you could rip someone's drive to a portable one in about 30 minutes.. without even going inside the machine..

as for the flat panel.. I don't think it would be worth the time to do it..

the big difference between your flat panel VDU and a laptop screen.. is that your monitor has all the electronics necessary... built into the casing.. on a laptop.. those electronics are built into the motherboard.. which means you would have to create your own set of electronics to control it.. and convert a VGA signal into the necessary signal for the LCD..

your best bet is to check on the web for spare parts vendors.. see how much another motherboard will cost.. you'd be surprised how "relatively" cheap laptop parts can be.. I once specced up a replacement keyboard.. touchpad.. and screen for a HP notebook.. the quote was around £140 ($260).. which considering the laptop at the time was only about 4 years old.. wasn't that bad...

[icecube]

There are several reasons not to hook the laptop drive up as a slave drive.

Some computers use the cable select setting and punch a hole in the IDE cable. There is no cable select on a laptop drive. If the laptop drive boots first by accident,It will alter the boot sector on the other drive so it won't boot. If it has a virus, you'll end up sharing it.

When you use the secondary IDE cable, you have 18 inches of play and you can set the drive on a shoe box out side the computer, instead of letting it hang from the IDE cable.

I can pretty much guarantee that you don't have any of the jumpers for a lap top drive. They are about 1/3 the size of the regular ones. I got mine off of some very old scsi hard drives. If you think about it, the laptop drive is configured only one way, I've never even seen a new replacement drive with a jumper on it. If you do find one, the drive can be set to slave, there is no documentation for it so put it on the second IDE cable to find out which two pins are the slave setting.

Your biggest problem could be figuring out how to extract the hard drive from the lap top. A lot of laptops are put together like a chinese wood puzzle.


Your 90% right about reading the data, if it was encrypted you can't recover it.

[RWD3]

well It originally attempted to boot from the laptop harddrive once installed in my good computer, but the asus motherboard I guess has a good bios and I was able to go in and set which harddrive would boot first.....as for my throw together computer...idk yet...and yeah Icecube i dont even know where to begin to look for the laptop jumper. anyway I still havn't played with it too much on my secondary computer, but on my first one I got it to work......thanks everyone for all the input, it is much apreciated.

one final question.... I don't have enough power connectors coming off of my psu to power this additional drive in my good computer ( I had to unplug my cd drive to put the laptop drive in), but what I want to know is what would the extension be called that allows me to use more devices. Is it a power splitter or a power wire splitter..idk..lol....dont luagh at me to hard.
anyway thanks again to everyone whos helped me out.

[liljim]

You can shop around and get one cheaper, ebay has one for about 2 bucks.

[RWD3]

thanks alot liljim