Modding desktop hard disk into laptop?

did you ever get the cable working? I'm looking for the same thing.

I have an advantech industrial computer that had a cable that did the whole 44p to standard ide. it got damaged. I had no idea how hard it would be to replace.

 

mechanicaly it worked, but I was never able to get the 3.5" HD to spin up from the laptop bios.

I also ended up killing the onboard ide controller somehow ( i think it was changing the gender ) =(

The idea of this mod was going to be a NAS box.

Imp

 

Not sure what kind of connectors you are using on both sides. But after looking at a few old 400mb laptop hdd's I have laying around it occured to me to just desolder their ide connectors and solder to them an older 40pin ide cable with the desktop sized connector on the other end. As for spin up I would reccomend double checking all your pinouts and make sure that you have the right pin orientation for the laptop side of things.

You may also want to make sure that your atx psu and your laptop are properly grounded to each other, this could allieviate any differences in the ground level voltages between the two that may occur. If you are still having issues it may also be a good idea to use a small 5v relay that is activated by the +5v LOGIC line that is run to the laptop's ide connector. The relay would switch on the +5 and +12v lines coming from your secondary psu so that your drive spins up at the correct time. The +5v Logic rail should be used in my opinion over the +5v motor because laptop's have the ability to spin down hdd's for low power, but AFAIK they do not cut power to the +5v logic line. After all that would result in a complete reset of the HDD, causing failure.

 

Something like this AC Ryan UDrive IDE & SATA II - USB 2.0 External Converter might prove handy

 

you can get 40 to 44 pin IDE adapters on ebay for cheap, they work both ways too

 

If you guys read the thread.... He wants to hook up a desktop based ide hdd to his laptop. Through the ide bus, not through usb.

The adapters you are talking about on ebay. I assume this one are to connect a laptop HDD up to your desktop. Notice the 44pin header. It is a female plug. Laptop's have a Female plug on them to plug the Male 44pin interface on the hdd into.

Unless you got 44 small pins and shoved them into the holes and then plugged that adapter in, it will not work. What he needs is a cable, not an adapter card. But I think he also said that he fried the IDE bus on the laptop.