Turning old laptop HD into external HD

[Deleted User]

Hi,

Im hoping someone can give me some advice.
My laptop has died & id like to retrieve the data on the old HD & use it as an external HD.
Ive been told that you can get adaptors for this & plug in with a USB.
Can anyone advise if I can do this & point me in the right direction for the bit of kit I need. Any advise or help would be appreciated.


Thanks.

Marty_J

You need to get yourself a 2.5 inch hd case. Then you just pop the hd inside, plug it in, and you're good to go.

These are the sort of things you're after:

http://www.google.co.uk/products?hl=en&q=2.5+hdd+case

I don't know anything about any of the companies there, so I'm not endorsing them. The link is merely to show the sort of thing you're after.

john_s_2

I read on a different forum the other day about this solution:

http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?ModuleNo=48965&doy=6m6

Connect your IDE or SATA hard drives externally via a USB port
Allows you to connect 2.5-inch, 3.5-inch IDE and SATA hard drives
Includes 3.5-inch to 2.5-inch adaptor, SATA power and data cables
Complete with PSU
Compliant with USB 2.0 transfer
''Plug ''n'' Play''
Pentium-233 MHz or faster PC & Mac with USB support
Windows® 98SE/ME/2000/XP; Mac OS 8.6 and later


£24.99

No messing around with cases - just plug it straight into the drive. Much easier to swap with a different drive (should you want to) and cheaper.

Although apparently the drive gets quite hot so you wouldn't want to use it if you have little kids around, for example.

superjaggybunnet

My son did this on his laptop when it screwed up. He bought one of these hard disk enclosures, took the HD out of the laptop, put it in the enclosure thingy and got all the info of of it no problem.

He bought a new, bigger HD for the laptop and re-installed windows and now it runs great with more capacity and he also has an extra 80gb external hard disk as well.

Well worth the money!!

AlwaysSomething

Target price should be under a tenner on ebay
try 'usb laptop drive'

loudcox

£24.99 cheaper???? I think not!

Search on dabs.com or similar for external drive enclosure - you can pay £11 or so. I searched around and got an excellent box for all of £6 :-)