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?

 

hmm it should work..
check from the bios setup (the thing you can get in right after you boot the computer by pressing Del or whatever it says) if all the SATA controllers/channels are enabled

 

what error were you getting on the laptop?

1. if it was error no system disc(or the like) then bad things have happened and you main hope of getting data back is one of the professional services

2. If it was just a windows error like can't find /windows/system32/ blah blah blah Then it should work.

If you can't figure out whats up with the bios and it's #2 my preferred method is laptop, plus usb harddrive. and a thumb drive. Load puppy linux on thumb drive and boot off it. Then mount the harddrive and usb harddrive. Copy data!

 

it just says,

PBR2 Done...

and nothing happens after that. Seems like a common problem with Dell laptop harddrives. Happens after the BIOS screen, before the Windows start up.

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.

http://www.techsupportforum.com/hardware-s...0-solution.html

 

Did you connect it as a second drive or set it as primary?

 

I haven't defined it either way. How would I do that? In the BIOS?

Both the laptop hard drive and the desktop use SATA, so I'm not using any converters.

It's not showing up in My Computer, and not shown in Disk Management part of the Administrator Tools

 

Sorry, you're probably not going to be able to do anything. Does the HD spin? My Dell HD went bad because the motor went bad. I was told the only way to recover it is to send it to someone that can disassemble it and replace the motor.

 

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.

 

Check under "integrated peripherals" in BIOS, some mainboards allow you to enable/disable SATA controllers, maybe the controller for SATA2/3 is disabled..

Maybe post the exact mainboard model so we can look up the manual?

Pimary/secondary is a non-issue with SATA (only with older IDE)

 

M2N61-AX
Dell BIOS version 1.0.12
Mobo made specifically for Dell Inspiron laptops I believe.