Can I Slave a Laptop HD to a Desktop PC?

[Jitter]

A friend gave me a laptop that is inoperable and its a few yrs old. Im not sure whats wrong w/ it, but it wont turn on even w/ a new battery and all that stuff. He doesnt really want the laptop anymore, but he wants some of the info off the HD. What i want to do is take out the HD and hook it up as a slave in my desktop PC or hook it up in anyway to retrieve the info. Then i will copy all the stuff thats on it and burn it to a CD or whatever for him. I dont think it will hook up via IDE because it looks like it has 48 pins and my IDE cables only have 40. Do you guys know of anyway to get the info off the drive?

Thanks

Kevin

[swimtech]

No problem Jitter, you need an adaptor cable, available here:

http://www.dalco.com/moreinfo.cfm?Product_ID=5079

The easy way to use the cable without changing jumpers on any drives is just to undo the cable from the secondary IDE channel connector on your mainboard and plugging the standard IDE end of this adaptor in. The nonstandard end goes onto the laptop drive connector - then attach a free power plug into the power plug connector of the adaptor cable.

Hard drives in laptops are configured as master and/or single drives so using this adaptor does require using an IDE mainboard connector temporarily. Your computer (if less than 4 or so years old) should auto-detect the laptop drive without incident.

It works great...

[Jitter]

Cool thanks for the info. I do have 2 drives on my PC now and i didnt have any problem w/ my PC detecting them. I just changed the jumper on the second one to slave and booted right up. Ill have to check out some stores around here see if i can find that cable or a similar one now that i know what im looking for exactly.

thanks again

[MiDKnYtE]

those adapters are pretty easy to find. compusa has 'em.