aceessing a laptop hard drive from a PC

[Mingon]

I want to acces a laptop hard drive from a pc, can it be done and if so how ? The reason is because a friend has lost his win2000 password and I need to either delete the SAM files or reinstall windows. The hard drive is fat32 formated and the laptop is a sony SONY vaio PCG SR1K

 

[IamDavid]

There is a bunch of different ways. I think the easiest is to use a program called Laplink.

 

[techhead]

Fry's Electronics has (had?) an adapter kit. plug one end inot the drive, the other into the IDE port on you m/b. Works just like an internal 3.5" HDD.

I think it was about 15.00.

 

[alocurto]

Umm.... if the hard drive is in a laptop and you can access the hard drive why would u need to hook it up to a desktop? Are you trying to make it a secondary drive so u can modify OS files? If so, how does one modify Windows 2000 password files in this type of setup? If you think it will get u banned for answering here a PM would be cool, I am just curious.

-alocurto

 

[Supergax]

alocurto, did you even read the posts?

The reason they need to access the hd via another computer is to delete the sam file. Of course, if the drive is formatted fat32, why not just pop in a floppy disk to boot to and delete the sam file in dos.

 

[Mingon]

Problem is that its a sony VAIO with no floppy disk, can you boot from a PCMCIA floppy ?.

 

[Moonbender]

I really doubt there's a way to boot from PCMCIA cards - but have a look at the BIOS, maybe there's an option. Does that specific Vaio model have a CD drive? If so - there are also bootable CDs, so that might work, too.

With the old Apple laptops, it was possible to pop in a SCSI cable between PC and laptop, and the PC would treat the internal drive of the laptop like any other SCSI HD. That was pretty cool, one of those neat Apple things. I don't know if there's any way to do the same with PCs, or even modern Apple laptops.

If all else fails, you'll have to open the laptop and remove the 2.5" HD and install it into the PC. I am not sure, but from what techhead said it seems as if the cable would be different from the standard IDE cable, so you'll need the adapter he talked about.

Good luck!

 

[alocurto]

<< alocurto, did you even read the posts? >>



I read it I was just unsure why one would remove a hard drive only to install it again. Then I realized he wanted to make it a secondary drive to edit the sam files. Then I wanted to know how to edit sam files. It was sort of my though process I guess.

-alocurto