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HELP! Laptop died -- can I switch hard drives between laptops

W

wilburpan

Junior Member
I'm reasonably handy with computers but I'm kind of stymied on this one.

I have a 5 year old Dell Inspiron with a Pentium III and Windows 2000. My laptop just decided to die on me. I'm pretty sure the hard drive is okay, as I replaced the hard drive less than 6 months ago.

My question is, there's a lot of data I need to get off of my hard drive. If I take out the hard drive and stick it into another laptop with a Pentium M or a Pentium 4 (or even an AMD), what are the odds that the new laptop will boot up?

If my idea above doesn't work, has anyone had experience with sticking a laptop hard drive in a USB external drive enclosure?
 
Odds that sticking the HDD into a different laptop and booting? Low.

2.5" to 3.5" adapters are fairly cheap. External enclosures aren't that expensive either.
 
You can get an adapter, but those can be picky sometimes. An external enclosure would be a little surer bet.

You won't be able to just boot up and use that drive; you'd be lucky to get into Safe Mode. The drivers Windows has for the chipset & all will be entirely different and it doesn't like that.
 
yeah...
something like this should be fine... pretty cheap too... i've bought two from this place.
sometimes they have sales on these things which make 'em even cheaper~
 
Thanks for the input. I picked up an Adaptec USB external drive case from the local Best Buy (I know, but I needed to fix this problem fast. The good thing was that it was on sale.), and am copying files over to my Mac right now. When I get a replacement laptop, I'll move the files back.

After I finish this, I may borrow a friend's Windows laptop and swap drives just to see what happens.
 
It could boot, I booted a Celeron based OS install in a P4 3.0 Sager (OEM from Toshiba) and it booted fine. Images are good things though buddy...
 
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