Would this work? Swapping Harddrives?

[Smartazz]

Lets say computer A's hard drive(SATA) is corrupted and will no longer boot the computer and needs to be formatted. Computer B's hard drive(IDE) is fine. Would I be able to put the corrupted hard drive(SATA) into computer B, since the working hard drive is IDE and the currupted one is SATA? So could I be able to boot off of the IDE hard drive, get to the OS then format the currupted hard drive? Is this clear enough to understand? Thanks.
btw, this computer is computer B, computer A is my computer who's hard drive is currupted.

 

[Lonyo]

In theory yes. But last time I tried it, the other HDD made my Windows fail to load (BSOD before it fully started up), when I took the other HDD out it was fine again, so YMMV.
In theory it should work though.

 

[Smartazz]

Originally posted by: Lonyo
In theory yes. But last time I tried it, the other HDD made my Windows fail to load (BSOD before it fully started up), when I took the other HDD out it was fine again, so YMMV.
In theory it should work though.

Is there a way to stop the broken HDD from loading in the BIOS?

 

[dBTelos]

It will be fine, I do it all the time. Just make sure that the SATA drive doesn't get set to boot first.

 

[lxskllr]

I believe that SATA is hot swapable also. You could probably boot up the computer, then plug the drive in once you're at desktop.

 

[dBTelos]

Isn't that just eSATA (external SATA)?

 

[lxskllr]

Originally posted by: dBTelos
Isn't that just eSATA (external SATA)?

I'm not sure tbh. I've never had the need to do that, but I would think SATA is SATA. I'm guessing it's just a matter of where the ports are placed.

 

[Smartazz]

Originally posted by: lxskllr
I believe that SATA is hot swapable also. You could probably boot up the computer, then plug the drive in once you're at desktop.

That would be ideal, can anyone verify this though?
edit: Wikipedia article
I hope this is true, it says they have native command queing and are hot swappable.

 

[Mr Fox]

Originally posted by: Smartazz

Originally posted by: lxskllr
I believe that SATA is hot swapable also. You could probably boot up the computer, then plug the drive in once you're at desktop.

That would be ideal, can anyone verify this though?

It (SATA) was originally geared for an Enterprize Environment they hot swap fine...

 

[Smartazz]

Well, I tried it. It booted with both drives connected so no hot swapping was nessisary. It's formatting as of now. No information was recovered off of the drive though. Is it possible to recover data off of a flash drive that wasn't formatted because that hard drive had important vacation pictures on it.

 

[Paperdoc]

Too bad you couldn't try to recover data from the SATA drive BEFORE you formatted it. Even though it was not bootable, there are utilities that can do that. Doing it after a format operation MAY be possbile, but it is extremely hard!

But to recover from a flash drive that has not been formatted? I presume you mean the files were on the flash drive at one time, then copied off and deleted. IF there was nothing else done with the flash drive, the answer is maybe. Check the manufacturer's website - some offer free downloads of utilities for just this purpose. And I'm pretty sure you can get such from other sources, too.

 

[Bobthelost]

Originally posted by: Mr Fox

Originally posted by: Smartazz

Originally posted by: lxskllr
I believe that SATA is hot swapable also. You could probably boot up the computer, then plug the drive in once you're at desktop.

That would be ideal, can anyone verify this though?

It (SATA) was originally geared for an Enterprize Environment they hot swap fine...

Yes and no, i don't think hot swap was in the original SATA 1.0 specification, however it is in the SATA II. However some chipsets supported it but did not support the rest of the SATA II features like 3.0Gbps so it's rather confusing.

SATA 1.0 is not nessisarily hot swapable, SATA II is.