Transfering Data from laptop HD

[uclaLabrat]

My buddy's computer is dying on him and he has his thesis on there, and we need to rescue it ASAP. Any way we can just pull his HD out and jumper it to someone's laptop and pull the files off?? Does it matter if he's on XP and I'm on Win7?

 

[jjmIII]

You can even hook it to a tower as a secondary drive...easier if you have the option.

 

[uclaLabrat]

You can even hook it to a tower as a secondary drive...easier if you have the option.

Thanks for the reply...we're in the lab, so I don't think anyone has a desktop here. Interesting idea though.

 

[frozentundra123456]

You should be able to get an external hard drive enclosure that you can put the laptop hard drive into that will plug into any other computer with a USB cable. Then you can access the laptop hard drive through the other computer. That is assuming that the problem with the laptop is not the hard drive itself. Just make sure that the external hard drive enclosure is has the proper interface (PATA or probably SATA) as the laptop hard drive. I think you should be able to read the files even though you have two different OS's.

And not to be critical, but a Thesis: how could you not have multiple backups of something as important as that??

Wouldn't he at least have a copy on the server at the school that he is going to??

 

[jjmIII]

You can put it in another laptop. It will be the primary drive then and start loading drivers. Of coarse they both need to be the same connection...ie PATA or SATA.

 

[Emulex]

usb enclosures tend to hang on bad sectors. i'd try directly putting in a box and copying with skip on error first.

many drives when they hit the bad sector will hang up. you'll have to copy around this - if that is the case. i've even had an SSD (INTEL x25-m G2) do this. hit that one file and boom no more response. had to carefully copy around that file on the bad sector.

then intel next day air'd me a replacement advance swap.