[ltp] Hardware Question regarding salvaging HDD's

[Analabha Roy]

Hi,


 I apologize in advance as this question is not directly related to running Linux on
Thinkpads, but I'm utterly lost and have nowhere to turn to for information/guidance, so
any advice would be appreciated tenfold.


  I had an IBM Thinkpad 770Z in which I had an XP/Linux-mdk-9.1 dual boot and everything
was fine, until one day it wouldn't boot anymore (not even the BIOS or anything). I took
it to a shop & they ran a diagnostic & said that the motherboard was damaged beyond
repair. Since the peripherals were working fine, I was thinking of maybe salvaging my HDD
and using it as a portable (it's an IBM Travelstar). I thought that maybe if I got a
standard USB hard drive casing (with the IDE-usb adapter in it) and connect the hard
drive and put it in the casing, I might be able to mount it in my desktop via USB and use
it as a 14.1 gig portable drive, after I ghosted all my Linux partitions and recovered
the data using "dd" in Linux or something (I have a written copy of my partition table).
Unfortunately, all standard hard drive casings seem to be 12mm thick, and the travelstar
is 15mm thick, so it won't fit. In addition, the IDE port in the adapter is female, & so
is the IDE port in the Hard Drive (& they don't have the same # of pins). Accoding to the
IBM tech people, there are no casings or adapters in which travelstars may fit.

 I was wondering if you could suggest a way by which I might be able to salvage the HDD
and use it as an external, or, suggest a way to connect it to the IDE controller of my
desktop via a laptop pin-set-desktop pin-set adapter (if such a thing exists), afraid my
hardware knowledge is next to negligible so I'm stuck. Also, if all else fails, is there
a way to format the hard drive (outside of connecting it to another 770Z, I don't know of
anybody else who has such an old IBM, even penniless grad students like me)?


  Please let me know if any of the above is possible.


Thanks,
Analabha Roy


	
		
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