Cable used for laptop to laptop data transfer

[muthabored]

Hello to all...

What's the technical name for the cable that's used to transfer data from laptop to laptop? It looks like a
40-pin IDE cable but has, in the center of the cable, a board that would be seated on a systemboard (the other end would connect to one of the laptop hard drives). I've recently given my sister one of my laptops but found a larger hard drive for it and want to use this cable...I want to know what I'm looking/asking for.

 

[bcastner]

This sounds like a disk duplication setup, not a laptop-to-laptop connection.

I would purchase two laptop/IDE adapters (~ $5/each), download from the website of the new drive manufacturer their setup software, and temporarily add the old and new laptop disk drives to a working desktop.

Use the manufacturer's setup routine to copy old laptop drive to new laptop drive.

Install the new laptop drive.

 

[yerhead]

do you mean a laplink cable? or just a laptop hard drive adapter for use in a disk top?

 

[KeironHodgson]

I agree with bcastner on this.

If you did want to transfer data with a laptop-to-laptop connection though the Network Interface Cards you need a Cat 5 crossover cable (Cat 5 is rated at 100 mbps).
Do not get a Cat 3 cable (only rated at 10 mbps).

 

[muthabored]

I've actually seen the cable but didn't know if it had a technical name or not. Again, it looks just like a standard 40-pin IDE cable but in the center there is a connector for a laptop hard drive and a small board on it that would fit into a slot of the laptop's motherboard.

 

[ceh4702]

cant you just network them together or network the laptop to a PC and back up the data or do a disk image? It use to be easy to get a USB cable that could do networking. It had a little fat part in the middle.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[Bobg1]

I know what you are talking about. Those were sold a lot with laptop upgrade kits, so you might want to do a search for something along those lines. I haven't seen any lately.
They were quite common before laptops had USB, cd burners and built in nics. It may be easier for you to follow bcastners instructions.
What he is refering to is there used to be kits available for upgrading the hard drives on laptops. They came with the new drive and a cable so you connect it up at the same time as the old drive and just clone the drive.

 

[diogenes10]

Ive just tried putting laptop harddrive in desktop to set it up, and have discovered, for me at least, that it is not quite as easy to do as to talk about -starting with getting the laptop open. However, given that you are going to have the laptop open anyway, I would think that using adaptors and copying in the desktop is the easiest option for you. (and then you could also use the old laptop drive as a spare desktop drive too.) (If you have ghost, you might also consider ghosting the new drive installation onto cds at that point too.)

Several things I was unprepared for in the process though:

1) My replacement harddrive did not have mounting holes in the same position as the old one-so it doesn't match the caddy. I still haven't figured out how I'm going to deal with that.
2) Neither the original or replacement laptop drive had pin 1 marked on the connector, so I had to give some thought to proper positioning of the adaptor.
3) The adaptor board pushes onto the laptop drive very hard and sticks out far enough to be flimsy when you attach the desktop ide cable. There are several possiblilities to damage things if you're not very careful. (In the last 2 days I've had this drive in and out of my desktop several times and have used up a large number of my 9 lives for error free hardware connecting and disconnecting!)
4) I wanted the set the laptop drive up as a slave drive on ide channel 1. It did not come with any jumpers and the WD drive jumpers I had were physically too large to fit into the smaller space on the 2 1/2 inch drive.
5) The ide cables in my desktop were keyed cables. The 3 1/2 inch connector on the laptop to desktop adaptor had no missing pins.
6) My laptop bios wont accept the size of a later/larger drive.

Just have some extra time and be prepared to deal with the unexpected.