Laptop died when connecting wrong power adapter to USB hub

[bjorn314]

Hi

I accidentally connected the wrong power adapter (19V) to my USB3 hub and instantly my laptop died. As did my external keyboard. Impossible to power on, no effect whatsoever. Tried with using only the battery or only the external power. Motherboard toasted?

 

[mfenn]

Certainly feeding 19V to a device that is only expecting 5V will cause problems. It's pretty expected that any downstream device connected to the hub would be toast unless they had robust self-protection mechanisms (i.e. a fast fuse or breaker).

Given that your laptop also died, it seems likely that the hub fed the 19V back upstream to the laptop's USB port. Most likely you fried a bunch of chips on the motherboard.

It could have blown a fuse onboard before it fried andything import, but unfortunately most laptops don't have user-replaceable tube fuses. Instead the fuses are soldered onto the board because their purpose is to prevent a fire, not to necessarily allow for easy repair. If you take the laptop apart and find a blown fuse, it's theoretically possible to replace it. You could also replace the whole motherboard, CPU, and RAM, but at that point you might as well buy a new machine.

 

[bjorn314]

Thanks for the reply.

Can I put the disk in an external enclosure (e.g USB 3 to ensure good speeds), connect it to another laptop (non SSD, or else I'd just replace its internal drive ...) and set the machine to boot from the SSD drive?

 

[mfenn]

AFAIK Windows proper will refuse to boot from USB.

What are you trying to do? You should be able to get your data back without having to boot into the OS on the external disk. When you plug it in to the other laptop, you should see all your files.

 

[bjorn314]

Yes, accessing the data is one thing but I've got a software development environment set up that would take a long time to set up from scratch. Lots of databases, etc. So some way of booting up another machine from the drive that was in the machine that died would be best.

 

[mfenn]

2.5" drives are the same whether or not they are HDDs or SSDs. The drive itself is compatible between your two laptops as long as they both use standard 2.5" drives.

The tricky part is finding a laptop which is compatible with the Windows OS that is installed on the drive. You can try putting the drive in your other laptop (internally) but I doubt it will work unless they are very similar. Your best bet is probably to search eBay for a laptop similar to your now dead one at put the drive in there.

 

[bjorn314]

Thats interesting, for some reason I thought the pc had to have some sort of SSD controller in order to be able to use SSD drives.

My backup laptop is also Win7, all though the versions are not exactly the same. I guess I should give it a try and see if it works.

Anyway, the (supposedly fried) laptop might be repaired or replaced. If it's replaced, it'll be the same model or slightly better I guess.

 

[JackMDS]

You can connect the SSD in an enclosure and connect it to another computer.

Then get TrueImage+ ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16832200059 ) make a TrueImage Boot CD boot the working computer and make a backup using the Dissimilar hardware option.

Buy a New Laptop and restore it from the backup.

You should have a Duplicate working Laptop that has every thing as is on the old SSD.

 

[AnMig]

make a back up image (Acronis) of the hard drive, store it safe somewhere

option 1: place hardrive on similar lap top.

option 2: place hardrive on a different PC or laptop, boot windows CD, choose repair option
hope it works. Should not erase your files or programs. If it gets messed up just put the backup image back.

good luck

I remember people doing option 2 when they where lazy and had to change a motherboard (different kind). its a dirty fix but you should be able to at least get your program working and backed up.

 

[mfenn]

Repair installs generally don't preserve the full registry, so programs may need to be reinstalled.