identify a hard drive connection

Creamy Goodness

first off apologies for the crappy pictures, don't have my decent camera with me.

story is probably a familiar one to you all by now, brother's laptop (5 year dell inspiron) is stuck in a continuous boot, it will show the xp windows loading screen, blue screen for a split second and then restart before i can even see the blue screen error.

so i thought grand i'll lash his drive into an external caddy grab the data, and that'd be that.

so i take the hard drive out of the laptop and confront with this connection





it looks like a standard IDE connection but with a thin bit of silicon sticking out between to two rows of holes.

anyone know what's my best plan of attack is here, again when asked my brother had he a back up i got that, "backup sure i'll never need one of them" :rolleyes:

Voodu Child

Looks like an adaptor fitted onto the HDD connectors.

You've still got a cover on the HDD, take it off and maybe see if that sheds any light onto things. Usually its just an adaptor that pops off.

JohnK

From the site below it appears the connection is an DMA/ATA-100 (Ultra) but as to what you'd use to get the data off it I'm not sure.

http://www.superwarehouse.com/Toshiba_60GB_SuperSlim_MK6026GAX__Hard_Drive/HDD2194/p/394084

Ghost Train

what model laptop is it, type of inspiron?

i'd try booting from a live cd, ubuntu or something
and see if that lets me back up the files to an external disc

hearny

Can't see it properly from the pics but some old dell laptops had adapters on the IDE connection. Try to gently pull it straight out be careful not to bend the pins.

As for the loop repeatedly press f8 after the dell logo. If there is an option to disable automatic restarts.

Restart and see what error you get.

You can then try to start in safe mode. Keep pressing f8 after dell logo then try to start in safe mode.

JohnK

Also, have you tried booting in safe mode?

dpmurray

Had the same issue with and old Dell inspiron a while back- there was a black plastic adapter on the ide pins From your picture it seems there's one on your too. Just wiggle it straight off and you'll have the ide pins exposed and pop it then into your caddy.


Hope this helps

Creamy Goodness

you're all geniusses or is that genuii.

it was an adapter on the standard IDE pins and also booting in with a LiveCD allows me to get access to the files, going to go with LiveCD as it's easier and get to use a nicer OS making the job somewhat more pleasant.

Skerries

try running chkdisk as this maybe all you need to do to get it working again
also run the diagnostics by hitting f12 on bootup, handy tip is to select non interactive tests so you can leave it running without having to test the keyboard etc