I have a sony viao laptop that has crashed and the guys told me that the hard drive had crashed. The operating system is windows vista. How can I recover the files on the hard drive? I have another laptop that runs windows XP if that may help somehow.
Grab one of these from any Computer store:



2.5" laptop HDD to IDE converter...
This will allow you to hook up the drive to any WORKING desktop MACHINE and retrieve your data...
Be prepared ahead of time...you may only get one shot at it.So what do I do, take the old hard drive out from the laptop, and then hook this adaptor up to the hardrive? Then I just plug in the USB to my other computer right?

Can I do the recovery by hooking up a laptop from a HD on a laptop(that had Vista) to a
laptop that run XP?

And do most of these laptops have regular IDE drives or do some of them have other drives?
Laptop HDD's are smaller than regular HDD's...
A HDD from another laptop will not boot properly in another laptop...that's why this is a wasted step and it should be hooked to a desktop system instead...
It doesn't hook up via USB...it uses a regular IDE HDD connector.The white plug is the power connector right, and the other end is the connector that plugs into the drive correct? How then do I transfer the data?

I was thinking also that if I got a 2.5 inch hard disk enclosure, then couldnt I put the HD (from the vista laptop) into the enclosure, and then plug the other end of the cable (that has the usb plug) into the USB ort on my XP laptop? Would that work
You're making this more complicated than it is...
The cable SHOWN is about 6 bucks...you certainly cannot get an enclosure for that price.
In the image yes the white plug is the Molex(power) connector...the other connector HOOKS both to the laptop drive and an IDE cable as a slave...

When rescuing Data i simply don't trust a USB connection but i'm old fashioned so yes your method would work...
Good Luck.youre right the cable is a lot cheaper. And if I find it in a store Ill get that. But I dont really want to open a desktop and have to fiddle about with the power and whatnot. In any case, I see how the moleconnector goes to the power. But does the other end hook up to the HD, and if so what do I connect to the IDE cable


Oh I get it, one side of the long connector hooks up to the HD and the other side is where the IDE cable hooks in , right? Sorry I have never seen this component before, so I didnt know.


But one more thing I wanted know is, is it possible for a machine that runs XP to read files from a drive that was on a machine that ran vista. Is there any problem with the file system.
No...no problem at all.
Unless of course the XP machine was formatted FAT32 which won't read NTFS ( Vista )what is the difference between ESATA and SATA hd? And are there just the three types of HD's: ESATA, SATA and PATA or IDE

Apparently the PATA interface doesnt FIT the SATA HDs and vic e versa
Quote from: patio on September 14, 2008, 08:01:08 PM

No...no problem at all.
Unless of course the XP machine was formatted FAT32 which won't read NTFS ( Vista )