Difficulty interfacing laptop HD with destop (Win 7).

[ascendant]

A family member's laptop HD stopped booting up, so they bought a new one for the computer. However, they had a lot of pictures of their daughter that they don't want to lose. I figured I'd buy a SATA adapter to connect it to my desktop. I was hoping that maybe the HD just had bad sectors and I could try to access some of their information to retrieve it. However, the HD seems to be causing issues with my OS.

At first, the laptop HD changed my bios boot priority to itself! So, I changed it back, but then it would load up to the Win 7 boot window (the one with their win logo on it), but it would never change over to the actual desktop screen. It seemed like it just locked up somewhere during booting up.

I thought maybe having 3 HDs on my PC was too much, so I even tried disconnecting one of them. Still had the same exact issue, so it doesn't seem to be a power problem.

I am at a complete loss as to what I can try at this point? I don't see why having the laptop HD connected to my computer would interfere with the bootup off my PC's hard-drive? If anyone has any suggestions of things I could try, I'd really appreciate it.

 

[Cerb]

Your PC changed the boot priority when the drive was added.

Chances are, Windows is trying to read the HDD that's bad.

What are you using to hook the HDD up with?

 

[ascendant]

Your PC changed the boot priority when the drive was added.

Chances are, Windows is trying to read the HDD that's bad.

What are you using to hook the HDD up with?

Just a SATA adapter: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812189193

As far as booting up, I can tell you that it is booting from my computer's HD because their bootup was slightly different when it first tried to do that. However, I am at a loss as to what I can do to boot from mine without having theirs interfere like it is?

 

[Cerb]

That's just a cable. So, you have a new enough board to support SATA natively, then. Does it support hot-swap, and if so, is it configured correctly to allow for it (like being set to AHCI or RAID)?

 

[Torn Mind]

What is your mobo's model number? We can check the manual to see if there are any settings you can adjust.

 

[ascendant]

That's just a cable. So, you have a new enough board to support SATA natively, then. Does it support hot-swap, and if so, is it configured correctly to allow for it (like being set to AHCI or RAID)?

I don't believe it supports hot-swap, but I'm not 100% on that. Here is the mobo I have: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131398

When I looked around through my bios, I wasn't able to find anything else that might have been causing the problem, but I'm going to double check again later on tonight.

 

[Cerb]

What mode are your SATA ports set to? They should have IDE/Legacy/compatibility, native/enhanced (maybe, some newer ones don't), AHCI, and maybe RAID.

If already set for AHCI or RAID, you can plug the data cable in after your computer is up and running, and go from there. Personally, I wouldn't use Windows to start off with, but I can't just go throwing you down the rabbit hole .

 

[ascendant]

What mode are your SATA ports set to? They should have IDE/Legacy/compatibility, native/enhanced (maybe, some newer ones don't), AHCI, and maybe RAID.

If already set for AHCI or RAID, you can plug the data cable in after your computer is up and running, and go from there. Personally, I wouldn't use Windows to start off with, but I can't just go throwing you down the rabbit hole .

Well thanks, I will look into that and give it a try. As far as Windows, I have used Linux (Ubuntu in particular), but I have so much software for Windows at this point it is unfeasible for me to switch over.

 

[ascendant]

Well, I was able to get it working once I changed the ports to AHCI, at least sort of. I could see the laptop drive, but I couldn't do anything with it. It kept causing Windows to stop responding whenever I tried to do anything with it. From what I was experiencing, my best guess would be that it wasn't bad sectors in the drive but actual hardware failure.

 

[Cerb]

Most likely. Since you have used Linux, you might want to, with another HDD as big or bigger handy, try a live *buntu, and install and try to use gddrescue (a forensics/data recovery optimized derivative of dd), to see if there's enough that can be copied to salvage something. I have had it perform miracles, sometimes (or, sometimes, just waste my time, but that's how failed HDDs go ).

 

[Torn Mind]

Parted Magic is a good liveCD for hard disk diagnostics and recovery. Also, a USB to SATA adapter might do better than connecting directly to the drive.

 

[ascendant]

Most likely. Since you have used Linux, you might want to, with another HDD as big or bigger handy, try a live *buntu, and install and try to use gddrescue (a forensics/data recovery optimized derivative of dd), to see if there's enough that can be copied to salvage something. I have had it perform miracles, sometimes (or, sometimes, just waste my time, but that's how failed HDDs go ).

Well thanks for the information. I will have to give that a try and see if I can get something that way. Using the method that I tried with the SATA adapter definitely isn't going to work. I spent a couple more hours on it today and no matter how I change the bios and how I try to access the HD, it just keeps locking up Windows.

 

[ascendant]

Parted Magic is a good liveCD for hard disk diagnostics and recovery. Also, a USB to SATA adapter might do better than connecting directly to the drive.

I'll have to look into Parted Magic and also look around for that adapter you mentioned. Thanks for the information. I'd really hate for my family members to lose the pics of their baby that are on it.

 

[VirtualLarry]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2359487