dannyalarms
Technical User
Hello, I was wondering if anyone can answer a difficult question, about a difficult situation. I own a laptop, Toshiba with a 40 GB hard drive. I saw I was having difficulties with it and was about to back up some CRITICAL data but it was too late. At this point my on screen startup info was telling me to check the cable to the HD. I could only get into the BIOS. So I tried to repair windows with the windows cd. After a minute the computer gets me to a screen where it says there was no HD detected, so I ordered a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter cable, and connect it to my home computer, it does not detect the second HD no matter how I connect it. I was told it's hopeless so I took the drive apart. I connected it to the last connector of one IDE cable and connected the other hard drive to the end connector of the other IDE cable, with no other drives connected. When I turned on the computer it the read heads of the laptop HD were moving all over the place (probably normal) really quickly, but definitely to a pattern. I noticed that there was an awful lot of activity, I delicately moved the assemblies mechanism which jammed the read head assembly in the middle of the disc so I turned the computer off then back on and saw no activity. I carefully moved the assembly and it spins and moves, the drive shows up in the startup screen. So I try to copy the drive to my C drive but it doesn't work, (it did show the correct space available on the drive).I disconnect the pc hard drive and boot windows on the laptops hard drive, A Okay. That is the last time the hard drive was detected in the startup screen. The pc does not see the drive at this point. So I recently bought a similar laptop drive to potentially take apart and probably ruin (hopefully not).The questions are: Can I use a jumper on the laptop HD help access the drive? Is it possible to use the case and electronics of the smaller drive (10GB same # of sectors), & each drive has two discs and the discs inside the drive are not attached to each other so they will move during the transplant. Will this be possible? If not is there anything out there that could read the info on the 2 discs. Thank you.