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Any catch in trying to read a boot drive as an external drive from another computer?

Born2bwire

Born2bwire

Diamond Member
My friend's laptop died and she needs to grab her homework off the SATA drive. What I am thinking is that instead of paying the local shop $200, she can get a SATA to USB hard drive enclosure for $10, put the drive in the enclosure and view its contents on another computer.

I can't remember if there will be any trouble trying to view a boot drive when you are not booting off of it. I know back when I had two boot drives installed that I had to do some tricks to get the right one booted, but I just want to make sure that she can boot normally and then simply connect the USB drive and view the files. Now that I read this back over it feels like a silly question to ask, but I do not want to make this too tricky seeing as I'm not there to poke around on the computer for her.
 
Two catches, IMXP:

1. If there was a hard drive password set in the laptop BIOS.

2. If the drive was encrytped

If you answer no to both, you'll be all set. Just boot your machine, plug in the drive, good to go.

Follow the instructions closely for setting up the USB to SATA drive connections.
 
paul878 said:
You need to take ownership of his files in order to access them.
Click to expand...

Crud, I forgot about that. She does have Windows 7 and her user account has a password. Would it be possible for her access her "My Documents" and such without booting into the original drive?

Hopefully, that won't be a problem. She just told me that she placed them on a separate partition and it is not part of the account folders (My Documents, etc.).

ch33zw1z said:
Two catches, IMXP:

1. If there was a hard drive password set in the laptop BIOS.

2. If the drive was encrytped

If you answer no to both, you'll be all set. Just boot your machine, plug in the drive, good to go.

Follow the instructions closely for setting up the USB to SATA drive connections.
Click to expand...

Definitely wasn't encrypted but it is a business model laptop. I don't think she would ever have knowingly setup a hard drive password but I don't think she would know if she ever did so. If she had, wouldn't she have had to type in a password during POST each time she started up?
 
Born2bwire said:
Definitely wasn't encrypted but it is a business model laptop. I don't think she would ever have knowingly setup a hard drive password but I don't think she would know if she ever did so. If she had, wouldn't she have had to type in a password during POST each time she started up?
Click to expand...

Yes, she would of put in a password on boot.
 
I have an external HDD cradle I use to access boot drives, plugged into a USB port... just yesterday I had my daughter's old laptop HDD plugged in and was looking at the files... no problems. I did have to take ownership of them, but that's just 2 or 3 clicks per file. I did not have to boot into the disk to view them.
 
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