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Hard Drive Gone Corrupt on laptop..Have no floppy drive
- Thread starter tberte
- Start date
joemck2004
Technical User
Obviously because it's a laptop, the drive won't fit into anything but a similar laptop.
Head to and download the Knoppix ISO. It's a Linux distro that boots from CD without modifying the hard disk. It has tons of stuff, including FAT, FAT32 and NTFS drivers (the NTFS one is a beta, so they don't recomment writing with it...) and it can burn CDs. Also supports USB pen drives! The CD burning might take a bit of configuration; check the man page for it. USB drives are the recommended way to back up data before reformatting. Just plug it in and it's automatically mounted and an alias appears on the desktop!
CD burning is a bit tough in DOS, which also doesn't have any support for USB disks. If you really want to do it through DOS, I've seen (but lost the links to) DOS CD burning software, a free read-only NTFS reader program, and even a DOS driver for standard USB mass-storage devices.
Head to and download the Knoppix ISO. It's a Linux distro that boots from CD without modifying the hard disk. It has tons of stuff, including FAT, FAT32 and NTFS drivers (the NTFS one is a beta, so they don't recomment writing with it...) and it can burn CDs. Also supports USB pen drives! The CD burning might take a bit of configuration; check the man page for it. USB drives are the recommended way to back up data before reformatting. Just plug it in and it's automatically mounted and an alias appears on the desktop!
CD burning is a bit tough in DOS, which also doesn't have any support for USB disks. If you really want to do it through DOS, I've seen (but lost the links to) DOS CD burning software, a free read-only NTFS reader program, and even a DOS driver for standard USB mass-storage devices.
These adapters are a useful bit of kit and cost under £6 UK, bcastner got a bargain at $3.29.
Even if you only use it once, at that price it's worth it!
You probably could find one cheaper than this:
Martin
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Participate and help others.
Even if you only use it once, at that price it's worth it!
You probably could find one cheaper than this:
Martin
We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.
So now that we have determined that it is possible to setup a laptop hard drive in a pc, (which I have right now in my computer as my DVD image holder, 40 gb laptop hdd), lets get back to the other issue. Once you buy the converter, it should plug in as a regular ide drive, make sure that you dont make this on a primary position, it must be a slave drive. See if you can find a copy of a program called Winhex, that is a beast, that will recover data on drives that have been totally wiped,up to seven times (DoD standard). I use that for more forensic things more than anything else, but there are free trials of data recovery tools out there after that. I have a previous thread in another forum when I accidently wiped a drive without saving the data to it. It was not really my fault, but the customers don't really care. Here is that thread...
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