PinMod Laptop HDD to IDE?

[imgod22222]

Wondering if anyone knew about any successful projects where someone hooked up a laptop hard drive to a desktop computer through IDE. I would be really greatful if anyone had any ideas or knows how to do it because:
i have a laptop.
It has an unmountable boot volume
It used XP, and worked like yesterday
I have some (a majority) of files that I want to hold on to but i can't get into the OS to backup the files.
My laptop does not support USB drives on bootup (for whatever reason DELL never decided to do it. Having in a USB drive on bootup usually crashes the BIOS or something)
BUT:
i have a desktop, and it's XP works. Was thinking if i could connect the hard drive to it, back up the files, and then format the laptop drive.

I appreciate any and all help.
P.S.: My dad doesn't let me spend money over the net and i've never seen it in stores so i have a bunch of wires and i'll make due with what i have if anyone can tell me which pins go to which.

[bchur83]

Well for starters, you can buy 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapters, both online and in some stores. Otherwise, you could hack up an IDE cable and solder it to the pins, but that would be a PITA, and hardly worth the time. Just look for the adapters.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812119020

That is what you want, but if you cant buy online, check out some local computer stores.

[Skeith]

Should be as simple as splicing a 3.5" ide cable to the 2.5" ide cable. They both use the same protocol, one is just smaller. I bought an adaptor that converts a compact flash card to a IDE port (since compact flash can run in direct IDE mode) and used it in my old win3.11 386 25Mhz laptop by splicing the two different sizes of IDE cables together, Worked like a charm. I now Have 128MB of disk space on the machine that is faster than the old 80MB hdd and best of all it uses almost no battery powe compared to the old hard drive. Battery went from about 23min of power to about 2 hours of power.

The only differance on the small IDE cable is it has 4 extra pins, 2 for the 5v power to the hdd and I cant remember what the other two are for. One is ground I think and the other is for master/slave identification.

Just google up some pinout charts for both the IDE sized and start soldering the corrosponding pins together. Make sure you know How ribbon cables identify the conductors they alternate since one wire is for the top row pin while the one right next to it is for the bottom row pin, so dont be surprised if pin 1 ans 20 are beside each other.

Belive me buying somethig of ebay will be much much easier if you dont have the previous experiance with this and dont want to risk your drive. If you have a bank account you can make yourself a paypal account and order it with that. You dont need a credit card. And if your dad is worried tell him to get with the times and do it anyway it worked with my parents, now they do all their banking etc online.

What about a network? Does the laptop boot? If it does pug her into your home network and share the HDD and just transfer it that way, probably the fastest and easiest way.
If you dont have a network just unplug your internet and buy a short crossover cable and direct connect the two lan cards together. Make sure both computers are on the same domain and that both have simple file and printer sharing enabled. Share the HDD on the laptop and then just brows through it on your main machine through network places (network neighborhood if its win 98x or win2k) copy and paste onto your desktops HDD and your done.

[four4875]

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=HD-108&cat=HDD

having used both, i like the one from geeks more. the newegg one, the power is on a couple pins like switch and led connectors to the mobo, and when it comes off you gotta be sure to get it back o nthe same place and all... can just trouble ya and waste a few minutes of your life. just my observation lol. they're lovely things to have for that very reason, needing to back up stuff from it to get onto your comp. another possibility is the usb to ide adapters they make,

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=USB2IDE-25-35&cat=HDD
has ide and laptop ide,
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=2020&cat=HDD
has ide, laptop ide, and sata connectors.

so you have a few choices in how to get the data recovered, best of luck to ya