Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests Help with crashed Laptop HD?

So my laptop HD has gone to crap, it boots up, displays the safe mode choices and then the windows screen comes up and it then reboots. Tried reloading Windows, says the drive is either not formatted or corrupt. Deleting the info is not really an option so I cant format. When trying to load windows, it knows the drive size but act like the drive is non existant....

Sounds like the drive is "skipping" internally and then reboots.

Anyway I can possibly connect to a desktop (do they make an adapter to use laptop drives in Desktop?) and use as a slave to try and access the info I want? Drive is an IBM Travelstar

IBM Travelstar.... DOH!

The dreaded HD clicking... It's pretty much toast. There ARE adapters for the mini IDE plug -> standard IDE. And, you have a good chance of pulling some of your data off. If you don't want to hunt down one of those adapters, you can boot off of a live CD distro of linux, mount the drive and send what data you can across the network ( ASSuming you have another computer to send it to...) It's not TOO difficult to setup, but depending on how bad the HD is, it can be very tedious.

--JamesT

Thanks for the quick replies, I may try the option 1. I have no plans to keep the drive after I get what I want from it and I have no problems swapping drives and such.