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  • IT Advice please. Dead laptop.
  • alexpalacefan
    Full Member

    Laptop failed last week, one of the boards is overheating and causing it to shut down. The same thing happened about 12 months ago and the local fixer guy was able to repair it.
    Had it fixed again, but the problem persists.

    If it’s a terminal hardware problem, but the hard drive is OK, can I just connect that to another machine and access it?

    Ideally I’d like to just slot it into a used machine and carry on as before.

    Is that possible or just at pipe dream?

    As you can see, I’m a bit clueless about all this, and as always any advice very much appreciated.

    Alex

    Cougar
    Full Member

    If it’s a terminal hardware problem, but the hard drive is OK, can I just connect that to another machine and access it?

    Yes.

    Ideally I’d like to just slot it into a used machine and carry on as before.

    This is a complicated answer, but the short version is “no.”

    ChubbyBlokeInLycra
    Free Member

    Take the disk out, pop it into a caddy and connect caddy to another computer. No expertise required. This one is a tad expensive but is the kind of thing you’re looking for

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    alexpalacefan
    Full Member

    You guys are the best, thanks.
    APF

    z1ppy
    Full Member

    Take the disk out, pop it into a caddy and connect caddy to another computer. No expertise required. This one is a tad expensive but is the kind of thing you’re looking for

    You will be able to access the data (documents/music) using this method but not (boot to) the operating system/program installed (which is why Cougar said “No”)

    Cougar
    Full Member

    I wondered for a minute why that post was necessary. I missed the ambiguity in the OP, nice catch.

    You can slot it into another machine and “carry on as before” if you’re adding it as a second drive in an existing system. If you want to buy a new system and install the old disk as the primary drive, expecting all your old software to “just work” as before, then you can’t (which is what I believed you’d meant in my initial reply).

    jimoiseau
    Free Member

    What you can sometimes do is connect the old hard drive to a new machine and clone it to the new hard drive. This installs the operating system in its current state onto the new computer and you will then need to mess about with drivers etc. I used this method to switch to SSD on my laptop. However, if you’re going to need a new computer anyway, you’d be much better off doing a clean install and just rescuing photos and other files from the old HDD with a caddy.

    Cougar
    Full Member

    The reason I said that the answer was complicated, incidentally, is that you can sometimes get away with transplanting the drive from being the boot drive in one system to being the boot drive in another. However, there a number of conditions to be met and even then an element of luck is involved in getting a stable system. It’s almost certainly going to be more trouble than it’s worth, which is why I said ‘no’ in the first place.

    Cougar
    Full Member

    What you can sometimes do is connect the old hard drive to a new machine and clone it to the new hard drive. This installs the operating system in its current state onto the new computer and you will then need to mess about with drivers etc.

    Whilst that’s true, it’s not going to gain the OP anything in this case. Cloning creates an exact copy; if the original isn’t going to work then neither is a copy.

    jambalaya
    Free Member

    @Chubby – appreciate your view (tad expensive) but £12 to save your data is pretty cheap really and if £12 is expensive and £5 is cheap we are stressing over small differences 😉

    OP get a caddy and borrow a computer to get the data off somewhere either onto a new machine or put it in Google docs for safety. The reason you can’t just plug it into another computer is it’s likely core parts of the low level operating system will be machine specific. You can do as Cougar says and make it a second drive and in fact that’s what the external caddy does just outside the computer body

    EDIT: OP even if the disk is “bust” in that it won’t boot-up (ie the boot section of the disk is corrupted) you can still save data, I have done that many times

Viewing 10 posts - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)

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