Can you remove the SATA adapter on a laptop hard drive?

[amodoko]

I am not too familiar with this stuff, so excuse my ignorance and don't laugh at me. Was trying to get my friend's information off of his hard drive for him on his laptop (his laptop died and won't power on), and figured I would just take his hard drive out and swap it into my old laptop and transfer the files to an external hard drive for him. Well, I couldn't do that it seemed. My hard drive had an IDE adapter on it (which you could remove), and his was a SATA hard drive. I then thought, well I guess I should just take my IDE adapter off of my hard drive, take the SATA adapter off of his hard drive, and put my IDE adapter on his hard drive, and pop that into my laptop and get his information for him.

Well, his SATA "adapter" wasn't coming off very easily so I figured rather than break something I would ask someone first.

Can you remove the SATA "adapter" on laptop hard drives or are they not meant to be removed? If they can be removed, can I just put an IDE adapter on a hard drive that used to have a SATA "adapter" and then pop his hard drive into my IDE laptop?

 

[voyagerfan99]

You can't stick a SATA drive in an IDE laptop. And the only laptops I know that have any kind of adapter on the SATA drive are HP laptops. The adapters look like this:

You need something like this to access the drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812161004 (This one is out of stock on Newegg but is available on Amazon)

Or this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812232002

 

[Geoff]

You can't take the drive out of his, and put it in yours to get the data off unless you have two hard drive bays, it most likely won't boot. Even if they were both the same interface.

Your best option is to get either an external enclosure or just a SATA/IDE to USB adapter to hook it up to your PC via USB and transfer the data that way.

The SATA connections on a laptop hard drive are the same as a desktop, it's just a power and data cable that come off.

 

[amodoko]

Hey guys, thanks for your help! Luckily I just bought another laptop for myself the other day and it just came in the mail. It uses a SATA hard drive so I just took my SATA hard drive out, popped his hard drive into my laptop and was able to get all of his information off and onto an external hard drive. But at least I learned something about IDE and SATA drives, now I know at least. Thanks!