hard drive cases

Factual Questions
1

My laptop got hit by a bus, and I was hoping to see if I could access the latest data on the hard drive, in particular the stuff that hadn’t yet been backed up. I was under the impression that it is pretty trivial to pop out a hard drive and stick it into a USB-connected enclosure. This may be the case, but I apparently don’t know what I’m doing.

I purchased a 2.5" hard drive enclosure. My drive sort of fits into it, but the connector is wrong. My drive has a connector with 9 pin holes on one side and 12 on the other, but the enclosure has 7 and 15, if that makes any sense. My hard drive is about 4 years old, if that’s important.

It looks like I wasted $20 on the wrong sort of enclosure. Anyone know what I should have purchased?

2

Take your hard drive with you to the store, or take a really good picture of it and bring that with you and match it up. There are, as you found, several different configurations, and you’ll always buy the wrong one first according to some law of physics.

3

Take a good look at this picture: http://jekkilekki.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/sata-ide-laptop-hard-drive.jpg

If your drive looks like the one on the left, you want a SATA enclosure.
If it’s the right-hand one, it’s an IDE (or PATA) enclosure.

In both cases, you need to specify that it’s for a 2.5" drive. My guess is that a laptop that’s 4 years old is more likely to have an IDE interface, but always check. To the best of my knowledge, there are no other widely used interfaces in laptops - I don’t think SCSI was ever used for anything other than servers.

4

Thanks. Looks like it’s the right-hand one, but with a female connector. I’ll double check when I get home and order a new one.

5

It’s an HP 40GB 4200RPM EIDE Ultra ATA/100 9.5mm 2.5-Inch Notebook Hard Drive for HP Pavilion dv4000 Series Notebook PC Mfr P/N 367786-001. Looks like this

6

There is probably an adapter attached to it that covers up the pins. It should just slide right off. Once it’s off, it should fit into a 2.5" IDE enclosure.

7

I was just about to suggest this very thing.

8

Correct. I finally got an enclosure. I was able to yank the adapter off the drive. I couldn’t get it to work on my PC, but oddly enough it hooked right up to my sister’s mac and I was able to pull of the files that didn’t make it onto the backup. :slight_smile:

Now I just need to buy a new laptop and keep it away from buses.

9

If you do that, you won’t be able to access any of the data on your new hard disk* :stuck_out_tongue:

*SATA, IDE, SCSI, etc. are all types of buses. Data buses.