Hello! I was asked to repair a friend's laptop and I have been unsuccessful. So here I am, asking for some help. I have a laptop HDD and it refuses to boot anymore. The person has gone ahead and bought a new laptop so now I am at the stage where I want to extract their personal files so they can transfer them to their new laptop. I have searched for laptop HDD adapters and haven't been successful in finding one that seems to be compatible with the HDD interface type. It is a SATA drive, but from all the adapter pictures I've looked at, it wouldn't work. Here is the HDD If anyone knows of a relatively cheap adapter that would work, please share. I should also mention I am in the United States. Thank You!
Do any of these look like they will fit? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...ESTMATCH&Description=sata+usb+adapter&x=0&y=0
oh to usb.. I don't see why not- if you have esata you can use something like this for better transfer speeds http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...cm_re=sata_usb_adapter-_-12-189-206-_-Product
In that pic it looks like your HDD is still in the tray to attach it to the laptop... maybe if you take it out the tray you'll get the normal sata ports?
After re-reading this, I think the sticking point is the "non-standard" interface on the 2.5" hard drivef. Have you seen that before? OP: what brand/model laptop did it come from?
Oh yeah...lol thats what I've just doing. As has already been said, get it out of the caddy and then just hook it up to a normal PC as you would a normal HDD and then you can access it.
Yup, I didn't fully examine the HDD. Tray removed, standard SATA connectors were found. Thanks! Good news out of this is that I may have just received a free laptop. Ill wipe the drive and put Win 7 on it after and see if it fixes it.
OK, need some opinions/confirming what I think is wrong with this drive. I have hooked it up to one of my PCs as a secondary drive and I am able to navigate around in it. However, the minute I try to do a copy from that drive to mine, the whole PC freezes. I've tried many times and each time it yields the same result. Frozen PC, have to do a hard shut down. I am leaning towards the direction that the drive is damaged internally somewhat. I'm out of ideas on how to maybe save these files. The drive will NOT boot. The drive will freeze if I try to do ANY sort of activity within it, save for navigating. Any other approaches out there? Thanks in advance.
Try using a disk imaging tool to create an image (e.g. ISO) of the drive that you can then mount with software. Disk imaging tools tend to access the drive at a lower hardware level so could get around any software issues. Worth a try...
The sector backup before you try to recover any data is a very good advice. It looks like this HDD is in poor condition and every attempt to copy can make it worse. First you should check how bed it is: keep attention for a strange noises while it starts, then try to get some SMART info (e.g. health status in HD Tune). Strange noises (knocking, squeaks or cheeps) - condition of HDD's mechanism. SMART - condition of the magnetic surface.
I would recomend Spinrite, as I hear nothing but good things about it. However it is $89 so that goes against it.
