PCA Forums

Hi guys

This gets messy but its what she wants:\

My freind Wants to hook up her old dead HP laptop hard drive up to a new desktop computer she just got tonight.
I told her no problem if thes data is intact.. Best way is to buy a lil black box and make it usb and use it anywhere.
The glitch she wants to BOOT off the dead lappies HD so it behaves like the dead laptop on the new computer..

What I know is the new Computer she bought is NOT ide.. it is SATA..

The HD will will be stunned if this even workes.

Guess I'm asking what cable I would need to even try.

I'm guessing it would be some sort of Laptop HP HD ide to SATA..

Any help or ideas would be great!

Thanks!

You would need a laptop to IDE adapter and then an IDE to SATA adapter.. But, depending on the OS that's on the laptop it may or may not work due to a lack of support for the drivers and what not..

GL!

eGo

Being a newer computer, it should boot off of a usb drive. I would disconnect the internal sata hdd, plug in the laptop drive using an external enclosure and then boot off of a windows disc (whatever flavor was installed on the laptop drive). Do a repair install and it should should then boot off the laptop drive. Catch is, most of the programs wont work since the registry gets wiped out along with device manager. I think there is a way you can back up the registry from the laptop drive before you do the repair on it. FP would probably know how to do this.

A repair install doesn't wipe the registry, that's the beauty of it, neither does the device manager.. But any new hard ware will need drivers..

eGo

So it would install the drivers it needs during repair right?

Well, no.. It just retains the "old" drivers.. But when the repair take place, it will use generic windows drivers to get things started until you install the manufacturer's drivers..

eGo

Things still get screwed up in a repair install, but mostly it will work. Many programs become unregistered & require re-registering. Bit of a pain, but better than completely reinstalling Windows & the drivers. Also, you'll need to reinstall any & all updates, but if it's that old, then it may not matter.

Windows will install the basic drivers for motherboard functionality & any other devices that are old enough for it to have stock drivers of (hopefully, that laptop drive has XP & not something older, or it's just not worth it). Hopefully, she has the discs that came with the computer, because they usually include the drivers.

I agree that if there are no IDE ports on the motherboard that you may as well just use a USB enclosure & boot from it (it'll be a bit slow though). Often times, computers will even give the option while booting to choose what to boot from after pushing an F-key.

This usually doesn't work. Sometimes you can get away with it if the chipsets are the same (which is not going to happen moving it from a laptop to a desktop - that's the worst possible situation).

I had to do this for a client once because there was so much proprietary software installed on the system that died, and no installation CDs. It failed to work (installed clone of old drive on new PC, repair install). What wound up working was installing it in a VMWare VM which has VERY compatible and generic hardware devices, and then doing a repair install, and then manually deleting all devices from the Device Manager, and then moving it to the new computer and performing a repair install. Even after that I had a corrupt IE7 that had to be uninstalled and re-installed, and a few other registry related issues. 8 hours of work, and believe me I got very well paid for it.

Overall I would strongly recommend you tell her it can't be done, and if she wants you to try you'd better charge her by the hour because it will take several hours and it may still not work.

Just backup her data and migrate it. Easiest thing to do, trust me.

Thanks a ton guys!

This is the info I needed to talk her OUT of it.

I think usb it the way to go too and just get the data off of it.

The easy way!

You could actually use Acronis with the Universal plug in. Image the drive to a file then just specify the SATA drivers during "recovery". All you would need to do then is install the drivers.

But yes I would talk her out of it.