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Swapping hard drives between laptops

JimJ[VT]

JimJ[VT]

Super Member
Stupid question, but my dad's got a Dell laptop that the mobo went bad in it, sounds like there's some sort of internal connection issue, getting power to the hard drive or something. My immediate reaction is to swap out the hard drive in my own machine for the one out of his machine, then transfer all of his files to his new laptop via USB or Firewire.

Anything wrong with this plan? I'm almost positive it's not a software issue, but a hardware one...it won't stay powered up long enough to even attempt re-formatting, and there's too much data on there that isn't backed up.

I know I could just buy an external 2.5" HD case, but that'd take an extra week and I don't want to do that right now. For a permanent backup solution that's what I'm going to tell him to get.
 
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Unless you two have the exact same laptop, I wouldn't recommend it. Also, not sure how you would connect the two computers -- network?

Get the external case. You can get 'em for like 20 bucks -- Comp USA, Micro Center, Staples, Office Depot, Circuit City, Best Buy. Then just attach his old hard drive (in the external case) to the new laptop. Your laptop doesn't even need to get involved.
 
Well, you miight get lucky, but..... If youre intending to boot using the hard drive of the old machine, and its Windows XP, it probably wont work. The issue is the IDE drivers. IIRC Windows XP uses drivers specific to the IDE chipset. If the chipset is different, it wont boot. If it's the same one, well you lucked out.

There is a command (I dont remember what it is) that prepares XP for a move by installing a universal IDE driver. That wont help anyway if the old mobo is bad.

One booted, XP will install new drivers if it has them. If the ethernet is directly supported, you might be good to go. Otherwise you'll have to get drivers in through a burned CD or something.

If its win98/winME you wont have any problems booting, but its almost certain to need some drivers, probably for ethernet.

I think I would either use a 2.5-3.5 adapter and temporarily install it as a slave in a desktop machine, or use an external USB HD case. It sounds like *way* less trouble to me.

Good luck with it. :)

John
 
Dusty Chalk said:
Unless you two have the exact same laptop, I wouldn't recommend it. Also, not sure how you would connect the two computers -- network?

Get the external case. You can get 'em for like 20 bucks -- Comp USA, Micro Center, Staples, Office Depot, Circuit City, Best Buy. Then just attach his old hard drive (in the external case) to the new laptop. Your laptop doesn't even need to get involved.
Click to expand...

agree with the external case idea....no sense breaking 2 laptops to fix one.
 
External HD cases for small drives are reasonable and can be used later for backups. First, however, remove the HD from the bad computer, place a bootable disc, like window or a recovery disc in the CD/DVD drive and see if the laptop boots to the bootable disc. If it does then the problem is not the laptop and could be a driver or windows problem. If that was the case a reformat and reload of windows would probably take care of the problem. Before you reformat you could use the external to transfer his files somewhere to save them.
 
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