can i use any laptop drive in my pc with the proper ide adapter, on ebay the sellers a very specific about whitch modles it will work on, can i disregard that and buy it anyway ....do i have to worrie about drivers? anyhelp would be apreciated, does anyone know were i can buy an adapter?-old stuff new stuff-Secondly is there a diference between a hdd to ide and a disc drive to ide? cant find any disc drive to ide on e-bay
I don't know about the ide > laptop converters, but i've been running a 2.5" drive from a usb case (in plentiful supply on ebay) and i'm really impressed. Would think that it would just appear as another ide drive, so no worries there.
If your refering to the adapters that adapt laptop drives to regular IDE connectors then you have no worries. These adapters work by converting the laptop drive to the standard IDE pinout - all this is done at the hardware level and there will be no drivers required. Buy away with no worries. I use a USB enclosure that holds a lappy hard drive. 20 GBs of storage in a little box - its a good thing. If this is what your refering to then there will be no drivers required for Windows ME, 2000, XP - drivers will be required for older OSs but they are fairly standard and generic drivers. I have used several different enclosurers and the drivers have ALL been the same ones and the ones they provided worked A1. If your just trying to get data off the drive or to use it in your desktop I recommend the USB enclosure route. If your sick and twisted (or for space reasons) and want to use one as a boot drive of course you will want to mount it internally - if this isnt the case (pun intended) then the USB enclosure has some serious advantages. NOTE: If your going the USB enclosure route remember to format the hard drive as FAT32 so you will be able to use it across different OSs. If you format is NTFS you will not be able to use it on 98se/ME or Linux - you will be only able to use it on on XP/2000.
Basically you can use the adapters with any IDE device - as long as the connector plugs into the drive it should work. I dont really have a firm grasp on weather or not the connectors on a laptop cd drive are standard or not...but Im assuming some are as you see alot of them in mods.
