Laptop drive to Desktop ?!?!

[wegonekilla]

Got a bum laptop drive, need to harvest as many pics off of it as possible. Laptop drive connected to a desktop cpu hopefully will be the solution.

I have the 40 - 44 pin adapter and have enabled the desktop computer to identify the laptop drive as a slave on bootup. Good to go there.

Problem: I cannot see the laptop drive in "My Computer" so I'm looking in "Drive Management" and I'm now getting a Initialize and Convert wizard when I go into Drive Management.

I cannot wipe the laptop drive out, I need the data that's on there.

Do I NOT Initialize and say Yes to Convert?

All help appreciated.

WGK

 

[Elvandil]

I wonder what kind of "converting" it wants to do?

I'd go with yes for initialize but I'm a bit wary of the "convert' option. It could be just suggesting that you convert to NTFS (if it was FAT32 before).

What do you know about its previous configuration?

 

[wegonekilla]

It's initialize that scares me......convert still doesn't sound like it wants to wipe it clean.

No idea on whether it was NTFS and FAT prior.

 

[Elvandil]

From what I've been able to find, that wizard may or may not appear when a new drive is added. It seems safe to press "Finish" on the first page. Is that an option? In any case, "initializing" is a normal step that needs to be carried out. It's done automatically usually.

 

[wegonekilla]

Negative....you get to pick which drive gets initialized and then whether or not to convert. You can "initialize and convert" or "Initialize and dont convert" but you cannot "Convert without initializing"

 

[Elvandil]

OK. Well, I believe you should initialize but not convert at this point. You see "initialize" as "clean it up and get it ready to use" while I see it as "introduce it to the operating system". I've seen the error in Disk Management many times that says that a drive has not been "initialized" and it just means "put into use".

 

[wegonekilla]

Initialize it is....fingers crossed. Thanks for the help.

 

[MustBNuts]

Just a thought here, but if you want to salvage what's on the drive...and hey, even maybe use the drive for extra storage, why not invest in a hard drive case. I have several hard drives scavanged from dead laptops, I bought the cases ($15) and connect them right to my PC via USB...

I even got one of them to boot XP - which MS says can't be done!

Just my two cents.

MBN

 

[Elvandil]

Modified XP's will boot from USB and there are USB versions of XP floating around. It's just installing to USB that won't work.

What happened, wegonekilla? Probably copying files as we speak.

 

[wegonekilla]

I Initialized and nothing.....no change. I tried to initialize and convert....it responded that it could not convert. I was so close....

 

[Elvandil]

Was the drive working OK so far as you know before the laptop died?

You said you set it up as slave. Is the main drive set as master? Did you check to see if it was set to cable-select? Some master drives also have a different jumper setting if it has a slave than when it is by itself. Explore the whole jumper world.

Is the BIOS set to autodetect that drive? It may be set to "None" if there was no drive on that connector before.

 

[wegonekilla]

I was getting blue screen on the laptop. Tried booting froman XP disk and letting it repair. It returned a write error after a while.

I had hoped to harvest as much as possible off the drive and then let XP completely erase it back in the laptop.

I tried Cable Select and got no response.

BB

 

[Elvandil]

So, where exactly are we now?

What does Disk Management say about the drive and does it appear with no problem in Device manager?

That write error is worrying--it can mean anything from a bad cluster to a complete mechanical failure. Can you hear the drive spin or anything? Is it getting power OK?

 

[wegonekilla]

Disk Management says that it is initializing but that never amounts to anything. I felt the drive wind up but haven't felt that since.

It appears in the Device Manager with no problems.

One problem could be that the jumped I'm using is from a traditional hard drive and it isn't allowing the adapter to seat completely on the laptop drive due to its increased size. I'll get some jumpers for laptop drives and then re-seat the adapter. It's on the laptop drive but it could be not hitting all pins equally.

 

[Elvandil]

Worth a try. If you can get access to the drive at all, you could scan it with recovery software, even if the access was not the "normal" kind through explorer. Some recovery software tries both BIOS drives and non-BIOS drives that it finds.