Dell Laptop Motherboard Goosed

chipbeck

Quick question for the boffins. My bosses laptop has died and we are assuming it is the motherboard so a dell engineer will be coming out to replace. Problem is that he could do with accessing the hard drive in the interim. Is it possible to remove the hard drive from the goosed machine and then place it into a working(compatible) laptop and access the drive?

totalsolutions

Er. yes/and no there will be a slight mismatch with drivers that will/might be corrected (WinXP) and then another problem when it goes back into the repaired laptop.
Why not buy and adaptor cable £5 ish from Maplins and attach to a desktop pc and access the data that way, much simpler.
The cable you will need is to convert the 2.5" laptop drive to the larger 3.5" style connector in desktops.

DatabaseError

not required for SATA drives (though it is for ide), they'll just plug into a modern PC so long as there's a spare sata and power cable, did it myself just a couple of weeks ago

vyseyboy

Also, even easier still, you can get 2.5 inch IDE and SATA hard drive to USB adapters, so that the laptop's hard drive will show as a mass storage device (i.e. a drive letter, like a USB memory stick)

e.g. this one from a popular auction site

edit: some hard drives require an external power supply too - I'm not sure if 2.5 inch stat laptop drives require one, but you can get kits that cater for all types of hard drives you're likely to come accross and give them a USB interface, if you look around fleabay.