Laptop Hard Drive

[Steevo]

This weekend I desperately need to backup my laptop hard drive because i'm
sending it off to be repaired under guarantee. I do not want to risk losing
any of the data stored on it and so need to back it up before Monday when
it's being collected. Since it keeps crashing it would be almost impossible
to transfer all the data from it via the network because it would constantly
freeze. I considered buying a new 3.5" hard drive (havn't got a big enough
one at the mo) to back it up onto although I would need to try and buy an
IDE cable for the 2.5" drive to convert this to 3.5" to fit it in my PC.
Would this work or is the 2.5" drive permantly set as the master? If this
would work does anyone know of any high street shops that would stock the
IDE cable and/or the 7200rpm Maxtor 120gb HDD with the 8mb cache?


Many thanks in advance!

 

[kony]

This weekend I desperately need to backup my laptop hard drive because i'm
sending it off to be repaired under guarantee. I do not want to risk losing
any of the data stored on it and so need to back it up before Monday when
it's being collected. Since it keeps crashing it would be almost impossible
to transfer all the data from it via the network because it would constantly
freeze. I considered buying a new 3.5" hard drive (havn't got a big enough
one at the mo) to back it up onto although I would need to try and buy an
IDE cable for the 2.5" drive to convert this to 3.5" to fit it in my PC.
Would this work or is the 2.5" drive permantly set as the master?

It doesn't matter, you can use the second IDE channel or change your
desktop HDD to slave and change it to the boot drive in the BIOS (on
all but very old computers).


Generally you don't buy a special cable, rather just a notebook drive
adapter, a circuit board which has the socket for the desktop 40 pin
IDE cable, the plug for the notebook drive, and a power supply molex
plug.

If this
would work does anyone know of any high street shops that would stock the
IDE cable and/or the 7200rpm Maxtor 120gb HDD with the 8mb cache?

It'll work (providing your desktop system BIOS supports the capacity
of the notebook HDD) but I don't know anything about UK vendors.


Dave