Hello, I had a pretty nasty crash when my friends son thought my laptop's keyboard was a piano, and smacked it pretty hard. After that, that drive has not been able to boot. I have a lot of valuable information on that disk (you guessed it) and i didn't have a backup. I tried everything, but there is no way of getting that disk back up. I got a new internal drive for it, and it works great, but i just bought a external drive, with the hope of maybe installing an OS on it, so that i can boot up and have access to whatever i can get from the crashed drive. My BIOS can take booting from USB, but when i installed WinXP on it, it showed the BSOD after the initial restart. Does anyone has any idea of how can i get around this? Thanks for your time!
switch the drives around so that the new 1 is in the laptop & old 1 is external & reload xp on the internal with the old 1 disconnected. possibility won't be able to retrieve info off old hd but there is always hope. what error comes up on the old hd when using it to boot?
The drive in the laptop is a 2.5. The external i bought is a 3.5. There is only space for one drive in the laptop. My idea was to make my external drive bootable, so that i can access the crashed drive, retrieve whatever i can get into the external drive, and replace the old one with the 2.5 i am currently on. Then take the stuff from my external one, into the internal one, and smash the crashed drive into very tiny pieces, burn it, and toss the ashes into the ocean. It sounds so complicated... The other idea would be to get an external enclousure for a 2.5 and put the crashed drive in it, and access it as a external drive. Though it would be nice if i didn't have to get a external enclousure just for that. Thank for your help! PS: the old hardrive won't go pass the Windows loading screen. It reboots when it gets there. No safemode, no DOS, Diskcheck freezes horribly then its about 10% done. I figured there was something physically wrong in the first sectors of the drive, so it wont boot. So i hope i can access some of the info through other means.
i'm sure theres a billion places to find stuff like this, but i know these guys because i've toyed around with mini-itx builds and have used these cables to run a laptop drive to a normal desktop motherboard. i don't know what you have access to, but you can avoid some problems with the laptop by using a 3.5 to 2.5 cable and running it as slave on a desktop (if you have one around). good luck. http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=9#p2003
when loading xp on the external, it comes up near the beginning of pressing f6 to load 3rd party drivers. did you load the drivers than for the external?
external case for a 2.5" drive is between $10-15. Try that before you go too crazy trying to figure out some esoteric solution. Or you can try using software like ERD Commander or Ultimate Boot Recovery Disk. Boot from that CD, then try to access your files on the hard drive. Assuming you have your old hard drive formatted in NTFS or else you could use a bootable version of Linux
Thanks the quick responses. I think i'm going to go with the 2.5 external enclousure thing. I used xxclone to copy my system drive to the external one, and when i booted it up it got to the loading windows screen, and it restarted. The drive inside the enclousure has to be set to master right?
laptop drives don't get jumpered master, slave or cable select. at least mine doesn't. does the bios allow booting from usb hd's or what usb drive??
If this is an external drive, master is find. There are pins that can be used to set as master and slave on some 2.5 HDD's and when not jumpered default to master anyway. http://sdd.toshiba.com/main.aspx?Pa...000026c1/818200000b12000000010000659c000026ed The link above is an example of such a drive that can be configured for master or slave.
when i go into the BIOS it recognizes the external drive as a USB, and lets me choose to boot from it. I don't understand why it would'nt boot.
You installed Windows on your new internal drive, Right? Why don't you boot from your new internal drive, then plug in your old 2.5" that's in the external case. Then drag and drop all your data from your old, semi-dead drive onto your shiny new one? Oh, Yeah, ... and beat that kids fingers with a spoon if he EVER comes near your computer again.
trgrpullr, if you had read flarehaze's 2nd post the new hd is a 3.5in not 2.5in so that is why external.
i borrowed an external 2.5 enclousure from a friend at work. I placed the crashed drive in it, and it started making some nasty noises. Kind of a ball rolling randomly in a roulette, but it won't list it on My computer. i tried accessing the drive through DOS, and it won't see it. The enclousure works because i tested it with another drive. I think it crossed the line, and if nobody else has any other idea, i really appreciate everybody's time trying to help me out. Thanks.
i think it is scrap as that happened with a customer's laptop hd. will spin but not id & makes a clacking noise.
