Extracting data from laptop HD

[TwoRails]

Hi All,

Can you get data off a laptop drive without getting a coverter? Meaning, any way to hookup a regular IDE cable to a laptop drive? It's for a one time use.

TIA

[ktkendall]

I do believe I've seen an adapter but I don't remember where..

[glc]

A laptop drive uses 44 pins - 40 data and 4 power - and the pin spacing is tighter than on an IDE cable, so you must use an adapter or an external housing. One time use or not, get an adapter, it's a very good thing to keep in your toolbox.

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=HD-108&cat=HDD

[TwoRails]

Thanks for the link, glc. I've got one in my shopping cart right now. For whatever reason, I was thinking they were $25 - 30. For $3.75, I just might get a second one for a friend

[rjfvillarosa]

Has anyone ever seen a converter for the internal laptop hard drives? I have a converter for the normal bottom or side mounted drives, but I have just had a Medion notebook in for repair and the hard drive was installed beneath the keyboard and my converter wouldn't touch it.

[glc]

You have to remove the hard drive and take it out of its carrier - and remove the existing adapter. All notebook drives are the same pinouts once you remove all existing adapters.

[rjfvillarosa]

I wish it was that simple gl, but this hard drive had nothing on it, no carriers not adapters nothing. I asked about this particular notebook in another thread because I couldn't find the manufacturer. Everything on the notebook pointed towards a LCD screen manufacturer in China but they do not sell notebooks. Eventually mc2phat posted in the other thread that the mobo number was the same as a notebook model number by pcg.fic. After talking with their tech support it became obvious that all the parts were proprietary and available from them only, as a matter of fact the guy was very doubtfull that they would have supplied me with any parts for it anyway. The machine is now back in France and will soon be back on it's way to the store where the guy bought it from in the UK.
Thanks for your reply but I think this one might be one of the ones that got away, should I ever have the chance I will post a photo of the hard drive.

http://www.pcg.fic.com.tw/marketing/
http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=126668

[TwoRails]

Got the adaptor, but I still have a problem. The adaptor doesn't seem to have enough pinouts, or I'm missing or don't know something. The adaptor doesn't fit all the pins on the hard drive. The "adaptor on the left" photo has a red arrow pointing to the pins I *think* are for the power for the HD, which are not covered.

If I move the adaptor over, then there are 6 pins of the HD not covered, as shown in the "adaptor on the right" photo. The red arrow points to the uncovered pins.

So is this the wrong adaptor? or do they go only on certain pins?

[glc]

AdapterOnLeft is correct. The other 4 pins are for jumpers. If you count the pins, there are 47 total - 39 for signal, 4 for power, and 4 for jumpers. However, you have the adapter on upside down. Pin 1 on the drive is next to the jumper pins.

With no jumpers, you must install the drive as a standalone on a desktop IDE channel, it will be seen as the master.

[TwoRails]

Ok, the power leads go on the left, with the adaptor on the left, Thanks glc

Since I'd just like to throw the drive in my external enclosure, can the jumper(s) be set to accomodate this? I have a fair assortment of different sized jumpers. If not, I could throw it into one of my spare boxes to get the data off.

[glc]

Leave the jumper off to put it in an enclosure, it will work fine. That's exactly what I do with them.

[TwoRails]

Great. Thanks again, glc.

[TwoRails]

I finally got some time to play with it. With the laptop HD in the external box, hooked up to a Win 98.2 machine, the enclosure is found, but not the drive. I then pluged the laptop HD into another older box in the work shed, as the primary (only) HD, no boot. Put the laptop HD back in the external enclosure and then tried it out on this computer running XP Pro SP1.

XP Pro Computer Management finds the drive, says it's a 12GB unit, but the (empty) file system is RAW. So, before I write it off as being Zapped, as a sanity check, is there anything I may be missing?

[glc]

Hook it up directly to the IDE on one of your machines. If it still shows as screwed up, try data recovery software.

[TwoRails]

I threw it into an old box with a PIII. In the BIOS, it's recognized as a 30GB drive (in contrast to the 12GB mentioned above) but it won't boot, giving an invalid error.

[Reaper]

so either its screwed or not,,,you may try installing it manually by header ect,,just a thought..

[glc]

Put it on the secondary IDE as a standalone in the P3 box and boot it off a preloaded good drive on the primary. That's the best way to recover data anyway - to a folder or partition on the good drive, there's no point in trying to boot from the suspect drive. If you need an optical drive for the recovery process (to install data recovery software or to burn files), slave it to the primary hard drive.

[TwoRails]

Will do, but it'll probably be next weekend before I get to it as this is a spare time thing.

Just curious: do they make a "reverse" adaptor? Meaning, is there an adaptor to plug in a regular HD to a laptop for testing?

[glc]

Nope - where is the drive going to get sufficient power from? To test a 3.5" drive with a laptop, use an external housing.

[TwoRails]

Thanks again. If I don't have any luck with this unit... maybe I'll turn it into a "reverse" adaptor of sorts