My son's Dell 600m finally crashed (hard drive failure). It got an UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME blue screen error and daignostics revealed a DST SHORT TEST failure. I put in another hard drive so he can function, but he had some stories he had written and some music files that he wants to get off the old hard drive.
Is there a way to hook up a laptop drive to my PC as a slave drive? I've done it will full-size drives, but I don't have a clue how to work with this little thing.
Any advice would be wonderful.
Hi
Sorry to hear of the problem with the hard drive. If your son's back up of his important files is not as up to date as he would have liked it to be, then its worth trying to put the old drive in either a (USB) hard drive enclosure and see if the data can be read from another machine (Best to put it in a Win XP or Win 2000 machine to start with, although Linux users may disagree!) An alternative is to purchase a laptop hard drive to IDE converter and slave it to a desktop PC. No way to guarantee success with either method.
Finally for a few pounds about £5 GBP or $10 USD or so you can buy a USB cabled IDE connector (with a laptop connector one side and a desktop connector the other) and it will also include a 5v power supply although almost certainly you will not need this with the laptop hard drive as usually they are able to draw sufficient power from the USB port.
If the platters are damaged or the circuit board has failed (or is about to then the above methods will not usually be successful and a data recovery specialist should be consulted. (costly but good!)
Regards
paws
