I pulled the 2.5" SATA from my laptop, and connected it to the SATA power and data cables in my desktop.

I was hoping it would automatically recognize it upon booting up Vista Home Premium, but it's not there.

What do I have to do? The hard drive failed, crapped out, so I'm trying to recover the data that's on it. Any help?

I pulled it because it's getting a common error for Dells, when it boots it only says " PBR2... Done! " and freezes. Occurs immediately after the BIOS screen. I booted from an XP disc and went into Windows Restore, and I did ' chkdsk /p/r ' and it said there was an error and unable to correct it. So, I'm trying to salvage the data by copying it onto my desktop.

http://www.techsupportforum.com/hard...-solution.html

Do I need to set it as a secondary HDD? I can feel it and tell it's powering up (vibrating). Both laptop and desktop are SATA, so I'm not using any converters.

 

it feels like the HDD is spinning. When I ran Windows Recovery, it could see that there were xxx GB used, but it wouldn't let me do anything else.

I just got into the BIOS setup, and it shows my normal HDD for SATA 0, my DVD drive for SATA 1, and SATA 2 and SATA 3 are blank. The laptop HDD is currently plugged into SATA 2. Any ideas? Doesn't appear to be identifying the HDD.

Edit: Problem solved. http://www.rdtiburon.com/index.php?showtop...mp;gopid=412843

Cliff Notes: Apparently my mobo has 4 SATA slots, but the two empty slots aren't available. I unplugged my CD/DVD ROM and used that slot for the second hard drive and it worked like a charm. I guess the other 2 slots are turned off somehow.

 

ive used one of these before to boot and get info off of when my old hd crashed
clicky
its a usb sata drive

hope that helps