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Laptop doa

waybomb

waybomb

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I was on vacation, downloading pix from my camera to my laptop, when my laptop went dead.

I went to the HP troubleshooting pages for my laptop, and it appears to me my power supply fried, ruining the mother board and other stuff. I am hoping the hard drive still works.

So, is there a cable adapter I can plug into the hard drive, that has a USB on the other end, so I can copy the drive onto my new laptop?

What's it called; where do I get one?
 
D

darroll

Guest
Take your hard drive to any computer place and buy a enclosure that you mount your HD in.
Make sure it has a USB cable sticking out with the right plug so you can plug it into to new laptop.
 
OhioTC18

OhioTC18

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Fred,
Yes you can get a HD enclosure. But make sure you get the right one. Some (maybe all) laptop HDD's are 44 pin, where as a PC HDD is 40 pin. When our laptop died I bought and adapter to go from 44-40 pin. I already had a 40 pin HD enclosure.
 
waybomb

waybomb

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Great, that's what I'll do.

After reading the Sunday papers today, searching Circuit City, Amazon, buy.com, passwird, ebay, etc, I decided on a 17.3" HP G71-340us. And picked it up at Office Depot for 599. Well, 649, but in a few weeks I'll get 50 bucks back. I've set it up on my home network (Cisco Network Magic) already, and am downloading 25 (!) Windows 7 updates, like 140mb of updates! Geez 25 already - I thought 7 was brand new.

But so far, the laptop is awesome. There's a silver lining to every cloud. It's good the old laptop died. It served me well. But the new one is so wide, I'll have to get a new laptop bag.
 
waybomb

waybomb

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OhioTC18 said:
Fred,
Yes you can get a HD enclosure. But make sure you get the right one. Some (maybe all) laptop HDD's are 44 pin, where as a PC HDD is 40 pin. When our laptop died I bought and adapter to go from 44-40 pin. I already had a 40 pin HD enclosure.
Click to expand...


I did this. The enclosure came with no instructions. It came with two USB cords, both have one USB end plus - one seems to be for power to the holder, and the other has a connector like on a camera. I plug them both in, the computer goes to the net and looks for a driver, and can't find one. The holder's light turns green from red after the harddrive spins up.

What's next? I am guessing I can go to the drive maker's site and download the driver? Where do I save the driver so the PC can use it?

What other options do I have to get the files off the old hard drive?
 
OhioTC18

OhioTC18

Gone But Not Forgotten
GOLD Site Supporter
How old is the DOA laptop? What file system did it use? If the newer computer is not using the same file system, it may not be able to read it.

I connected all of my old HDD's and could not access 2 of them. They were using an older file system.
 
waybomb

waybomb

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I don't know the answer. Both machines are HP; the old one NC6220 running XP Pro, the new one G71 running 7.

I'll have some time this weekend to try and figure this out. I'll let y'all know what I find out on Monday.
 
waybomb

waybomb

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I hooked it up to my xp pro desktop, still didn't work. The drive spins up. I'll drop it off at a pc place on Monday and see if they can get my files.
 
waybomb

waybomb

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I signed up at tech support guy and posted there. Hope somebody can help me over there.
 
waybomb

waybomb

Well-known member
GOLD Site Supporter
We had a tech guy in today - we use an outside IT outfit. They wanted me to bring in my laptop to set up the VPN on it.

I brought my old hard drive in too. The tech guy did all the things I did, but it wouldn't work. I told him take it back to the shop to see if somebody there could help. Within two minutes, he brought it back to me, saying it works now.

Solution - a jumper on the drive making it a primary in the old laptop or not. Had to move the jumper to not. I plugged it in, my new laptop recognized it almost instantly. I copied all my files over!

Life is good.
 
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