hard drive addapter help!!!!!!!

i have a compaq laptop harddrive that i took out of my laptop. then i baught a laptop harddrive addapter so that i could put it into my compaq desktop. and now i am just not sure what to do. i know how to make it all fit together. but i am not sure of what to do to make it work. i know nothing about hard drives. do i have to somehow configure it? or what. i am desperate. any help would be greatly appriciated. thanks

 

You need to have it connected to an IDE cable and set to master, slave depending on it's relation to the other drive on the same cable. You will probably need to change the jumper on your primary drive to make it master also. Once that is done, reboot and go into the BIOS when prompted to enter setup by pressin F10 (i believe that's correct for Compaq). Once there go into the settings for Hard Drives and let it auto detect your drive. If it picks up the drives geometry correctly save the settings and boot into Windoze.

 

that will help a lot! thank you very much. but how do i set the jumpers from master to slave?

 

They are always shown right on the drive label. Take your current drive out completely and look at the label. The laptop drive should have it too...you might need to go to a local PC shop to get thos small jumpers though.

I take that back...my laptop drive doesn't have the settings. You might ahve to go to the manufacturer's web site to find them.

 

but where are the jumpers themselves located? thanks

 

If you are looking at the laptop drive there probably aren't any on there...you have to go get one. The primary drive might not have one on it either....they look like small black or white pieces of plastic with metal connectors inside about an 1/8th inch wide...on the pins by where the ribbon cable plugs in.

 

would the desktop computer let me just swap the harddrives. like take the desktop one out and put the laptop in? if so how would i do that?

 

Probably not, the hardware between the 2 computers is completely different and might cause more problems than it's worth. Why are you trying to do this in the first place? I am sure there si a better solution than what you are trying to do here.

 

i had the laptop then it kinda broke and i just wanted to get some files off of the laptop hard drive. is thee a better way of doing that? if there is that would be cool

 

Easiest is to put the laptop drive in as slave and get it set up that way. Then you can pull whatever you wand off of it and transfer it to your C drive.

 

cool. thanks a lot for all of your help. looks like i am going to have to go buy some laptop hard drive jumpers. thanks again.