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Dam computers
hopefuldave:
There *are* pretty cheap adaptors on eBay that do SATA and IDE both, to USB - as the computer geek that gets lumbered - oops, asked nicely to sort everyone's PC's, they're really handy to have, along with an external drive to save what I can recover - but an enclosure is good if you have another pc you can plug into.
vtsteam:
Next time, before you rip the disk out get a friend to make you a CD of Puppy Linux -- available free on the internet. Then boot off of that CD. Assuming your motherboard didn't go.
If it did, well, yes, rip the disk out.
AdeV:
Oooh, snap, I've got one of those sitting on my desk, the only difference is mine is a 160GB. It too is dead.
One thing you could try is, pick the disk up by the long sides, 4 fingers on one side, thumb on the other; and then rotate it back & forth rapidly (in the plane the disk would spin) a couple of times. Then try booting again.
Sometimes, these drives suffer stiction, and just need a quick jolt to free them up. I had that problem this very weekend with my laptop.
awemawson:
Yep - we used to call that action "the Compaq prayer" with both hands pressed together when I was in IT support!
vtsteam:
You can run Puppy linux in a laptop with a dead drive. Many people do that as their main OS for years without even bothering to replace the hard drive.
They boot off the Puppy Linux CD and use a thumb drive for data storage, or even move the Linux OS to the thumb drive as well and boot from that (if the laptop BIOS allows booting from USB.)
If the hard drive is readable, but the boot or Windows OS is messed up on it, you can just continue using the data from the HD as if it was a normal drive under Puppy Linux. It doesn't care about the old OS.
In fact it, and the application programs bundled with it, run in RAM, so once it is up and loaded, you can remove ALL disks, and still be running the OS and your programs. This also makes it lightning fast compared to XP in an older computer.
The entire OS, including word processor, spreadsheet, photo editor, browser, movie player, and about 50 other programs all loaded as a bundle of only about 100 megabytes total in size, so they fit in just about any modern memory size.
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