I need help please! My laptop met with a rather unfortunate accident - my fist and the screen did not get along at all and one thing led to another and .. well .. the screen doesn't work too well anymore. It was an ancient, hand-me-down monstrosity on perpetual slow mo ... it was in very much need of an upgrade anyways!! My problem: The HDD has a lot of information on there that i need access to. I have a home pc. Is there any way to just plug the HDD into my pc and access/copy the information stored on there? Or do i need to tweak certain settings / turn off the machine etc. before plugging in any new device? I know nothing.. so please speak in laman terms when giving suggestions I think there is some sort of docking station and i can buy, but since this is a one-off i don't want to have to purchase it if there is a simple less expensive solution out there. Your help is very very much appreciated.. thanks !!
The simplest solution is to buy a 'laptop hard drive caddy'. Then remove the hard drive from the laptop put it in the caddy and plug the caddy via USB into any PC you like. The other advantage of this is that you can use this hard drive easily as portable storage in the future too. Alternatively you can add the laptop hard drive as a second hard drive to your main PC. You may need adapters or extra cables depending on the type of laptop drive. For recommendations/further advice of either solution, we'd need to know whether your laptop hard drive is an 'IDE' or 'SATA' drive. Find that out first if you can or take it out and post a picture of the connectors and we'll tell you.
thanks for the suggestions.. i have the HDD in front of me.. its a Toshiba MK8034GSX disk drive. It does not give me any clue as to whether or not its IDE or SATA... but if i pull the pin connector off (15 pins with a gap and then another 7 pins), underneath is two flat looking connections. i can fit my spare PSU S-ATA cable on one of them ... and i can only presume the other bit (half the size of the connection used for the PSU cable) must be for the cable to connect to the MB? I do notice straight up that i don't have a spare MB cable. If i open up the case on my pc, i have only one red cable connecting my current HDD. I don't suppose i can just go ahead and switch off the pc, unplug the one and plug the other one in and turn it back on? I may just have to go ahead and buy this laptop HD caddy. Thanks again for your help !
This'll do the job, if you want it as a portable drive after you've finished backing it up. By the way, sata is ide. The two common interfaces are pata and sata. It's a sata drive. And you're right about connecting it up, too. Find a spare sata data cable and you'll be good to go to back it up. No. I would be incredibly surprised if it booted. You can get an extra sata data cable like this one.
sounds like a SATA connector is its half the size of a SATA PSU connector. you all need is an extra SATA cable to attach your HDD to your motherboard. They are pretty cheap < £5 easy. Try to borrow a SATA cable from a friend also. you cant disconnect the main HDD in your PC as it wont work. do you intend to keep the HDD after you get your data off ? if you do and would like to use it a caddy is probly best. If you dont then just get a SATA cable and that will do the job fine.
Thanks everyone for your help. Very much appreciated ! Searched online for a cheap caddy.. got one for around the price i would have paid for the extra cable.. so very happy !!!! and it works
