[ltp] Hardware Question regarding salvaging HDD's

[Aaron Mulder]

	I overheard a CompUSA sales guy claiming they had 1 external drive 
casing that would fit notebook drives.  I didn't check it out, and I don't 
know how many mm it accomodates, but it might be worth looking into.  I 
also don't know whether it was USB or FireWire.  I guess this qualifies as 
"long shot".  :)

Aaron

On Mon, 12 Apr 2004, Analabha Roy wrote:
> 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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