Laptop HDD question

My laptop died the other day, it was on the way out for a while so no big deal, but I'm pretty keen to get the data off the hard drive for it and get it onto my new laptop. Can it be as simple as swapping the hard drives and booting up the new computer with the old hard drive in it, or will that cause all sorts of compatibility issues? Will I need to scour ebay for some sort of USB adapter thing, or am I better off taking it to some bloke? I'm reasonably confident the HDD is still in working order. Thanks!

AFAIK you can't plug it in and boot it up as your old laptop did.

When you installed the OS, it uses the info of your old laptop components in the install (correct me if I am wrong, or please word it better for me!).

When you boot up in the new machine, it will be trying to find info about the old laptop components and thus won't boot.

So you'd need to get an external caddy/converter to connect it to your new laptop and transfer the data.


Jenson drives it like he owns it; Lewis drives it like he stole it

strange iv installed different hard drives into my laptop and it booted fine. shouldnt be an issue?

With the new hard drive the laptop won't boot at all unless you clone the old hard drive to the new one, and for that you'll either need a USB adapter or a mate with a desktop PC. Some laptops have the space for two hard drives, but they're normally reserved for the huge gaming laptops that you're unlikely to have. If you've got a mate with a desktop PC and the two hard drives are SATA, then you can just plug them into the desktop alongside his existing drives and they should work fine - laptop and desktop SATA is exactly the same. Make sure it still boots from his drive, and then see below for some software to use to clone your drives.

For imaging software, if you've got a Western Digital drive you can get a slightly cut-down version of Acronis True Image Home Edition for free. If not, then something like DriveImage XML should do the job for free, though while I've seen it recommended, I don't think I've ever used it myself.

For the record, if the old hard drive starts misbehaving and refuses to be recognised, then I find the controller on USB enclosures to be more resilient and more likely to detect a dying hard drive than the controller built into the laptop. That said, if the hard drive is dying but is still detected, then it's more likely to be developing bad sectors rather than an electrical fault, so that trick would be unlikely to work.

Two other tricks for a dying hard drive to use as a last resort - take the drive out of the laptop, stick it in a freezer back, seal the freezer bag and throw the hard drive in the freezer for an hour. If this works, you may need to repeat the trick a few times in order to get all the data off it, as the drive will start failing again as it heats up.

That one's safe so long as the freezer bag is tied tightly. This one is more of a last resort. Take the drive out of the laptop and whack it off a desk/bench/wall. Sometimes it's enough to free a jammed head. It's worked for me once, but it's only to be used as a last resort, and obviously don't do this if you intend to send a drive off to a data recovery firm...

Righto guys, thanks for the help. Gav I've been thinking of mates who'd have a desktop pc, and honestly, I can't think of someone who does, other than my folks back home. A good reflection on a) everyone I know has laptops and b) none of my friends are nerdy enough to have a decent gaming machine. Or c), I don't know many people. We'll ignore that one though.

I'll buy this - [www.ebay.com.au] .I honestly don't know if that's what I need, or if it's purely just for those external HDDs. For 7 bucks I'll risk it, unless someone jumps in here first and tells me I'm a fool. If all works well, hooray interwebs!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/05/2011 11:18AM by MikaHalpinen.

That looks like an enclosure only, no HDD, however that may be what you're looking for.

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Stick one hard drive in the laptop, the other in the enclosure, then use a bootable USB stick or CD to do the cloning.

Woot woot all sorted. Thank you gentlemen