Can they be connetced to a desktop??

Home laptop threw a wobbly last night…

… personaly I suspect that MS have killed it. It was installing 8 updates (shut down after installing Office 2010) and tried to re-start after the last update. Booted to BIOS flash screen, then

error, unable to read disk

🙁

Can't get in to the machine anyhow at the moment. I have a bootable recovery disk, which works as far as the option to start recovery – at which point it will kindly erase everything on C:

So – either my HD has gone up the spout (at coincidently the same time as Vista decided to update…), or Vista has pulled some stunt or other which has corrupted the boot sector of my C: drive.

The HDD is a Seagate Momentus (have always rated Seagate and Western Digital for relaibility). Can it be attached to one of the spare SATA slots on my desktop to check it over and recover / back up any files I want to retain?

Thanks in anticipation.

Yes you can connect it, you will need to buy an adapter though.

Best to get a USB adapter from ebay rather than trying to open your PC and connecting it to your motherboard.

Can it be attached to one of the spare SATA slots on my desktop to check it over and recover / back up any files I want to retain?

Yep if it's SATA, which it looks to be, then just plug it into the the spare slot in your desktop. You may need to use some sort of recovery software in order to access the drive though, as it sounds like your boot info has corrupted.

http://www.knoppix.net/ is free and will probably do the job, though it can be a bit of an ass when trying to copy the info over (due to the partition type)

error, unable to read disk

Is that exactly what it says? Can you post an exact error message?

Is that exactly what it says? Can you post an exact error message?

I paraphrased…

A disk read error occured
Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to restart

If all else fails THIS is a reasonable option to get the data back.

Right.

A Chkdsk should fix that. Two options, slave it to your desktop as you suggest, or get to a recovery console prompt if you can.

OEM "Recovery Discs" can be a pain, but they're generally a lot more 'normal' than they used to be. Is 'format and start again' really the only option it gives you? Normally you get some method of starting a Windows repair (I've never seen a disc -not- do this since Vista days), where you can select 'repair my installation' or drop to the Recovery Console.

Transplanting the drive is straight-forward, assuming the type of drive (IDE or SATA) is supported in your desktop. If it's IDE you'll need a means of connecting a 2.5" disk to a desktop, either externally or internally; if it's SATA then the connectors are the same for both sizes, assuming you've a spare SATA cable it should just plug straight in.

Cougar – Yes, OEM recovery disk offers recover or exit – with recovery subsequently warning that C: will be erased 👿

Connecting to one of the SATA leads on the desktop sounds like the best bet. Not sure if there is a spare, but can always disconnect one of my data drives.

If nothing else, this should be the push I needed to get Win 7 on to the laptop to replace the OEM Vista – that or back to XP…

You can get little caddies that you stick the drive in then they become a normal USB external hard drive.

I'd say whip out the HD from the laptop, and stick it in either this or this, depending on whether your HD is IDE or SATA.

Under a fiver, can't go wrong, well, only a fivers worth of wrong 😀

Cheers, Rich

… personaly I suspect that MS have killed it

I'm sorry!!!

Get a caddy from ebay and it should be fine. Done it with a couple of hard drives.

Connecting to one of the SATA leads on the desktop sounds like the best bet. Not sure if there is a spare, but can always disconnect one of my data drives.

Problem solved.

(duplicate post deleted)

My other half's laptop went belly up a while back and apparently was a hard drive problem.
I downloaded Puppy Linux using another machine & stuck that on a CD. You need to install the image onto the CD (took me a while to work out what that meant) and then you can boot this from the CD (must be a CD, not a DVD).

You have to set your BIOS first to boot from CD rather than HDD, but once it was up & running I was able to stick all the stuff she wanted to keep onto a memory stick before installing a new drive.

Well, that's truly bizarre.

Plugged the laptop HDD into a spare desktop SATA port. It took about 3 hours for chkdsk to chunk through everything, and seemed to be doing an awful lot of deleting / reallocating / re-indexing….

… but at the end of it I could access the file structure and copy across the data I wanted to retain (mainly photos that hadn't been backed up elsewhere) to an archive drive.

Put drive back into the laptop, and whilst it wouldn't fully launch Windows, it would boot through to the repair console (where previously it wouldn't even read the HD / launch the OS)

SO, what happened?

I somewhat tongue in cheek blamed the Microsoft automatic update package – but seeing as there is no apparent hardware fault on the drive, what else could have caused such a catastrophic failure???

And, of course, MANY THANKS to the STW tech support collective 8)

Software corruption. It happens. Can sometimes be an underlying hardware issue (faulty disk or dodgy RAM) but not always.

Take regular backups. Cougar's Second Law of IT.

but seeing as there is no apparent hardware fault on the drive

They can hide. I had strange faults for ages, then something figured out there were actually bad sectors there after all.

What's cougar's first law of IT?

What's cougar's first law of IT?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.