laptop crash

[astinkybumb]

alright i have my girlfriends laptop that crashed some how... i have the hard drive out of it and i would like to hook it to my desktop to try and see if i can access he stuff... she doesnt have the reboot cd to run on her laptop... its a dell insperon 1501 fyi... what would i need to do to hook her hard drive up to my compute to see if the stuff is alright or if it was a hard drive crash?

here is what i have tried:
i unhooked my hard drive and hooked hers in place
tried running my reboot cd on her laptop and going threw the setup menu....

what all would i need and could some one show me how to hookup a second hard drive sata cable and what ever the other cable is...

 

[johnb35]

You can't reinstall windows on her hard drive when its in your computer. The only thing you can do right now is hook her drive up to your computer with leaving your hard drive hooked up the way it is and just hook hers up as a data drive basically. Then boot your computer up and see if you can access her files when your computer sees it and installs what it needs to access the drive.

I had the Inspiron 1501, it's a SATA connection for the hard drive. If your computer has SATA ports then just use a SATA data cable and SATA power cable to hook up her drive to your computer. After you hook it up, go into the bios to make sure your drive is still set to first boot device. Sometimes when you hook up another hard drive, it might get set to first boot device instead.

Dell should have shipped her reinstallation cd's, they did for me when I ordered mine 2 years ago. If she can't find them, then she'll have to contact dell for replacements cd's.

 

[The_Other_One]

If it didn't come with a reinstall CD (and you've not done too much to the drive yet) check and see if it has some kind of reload partition. Normally during POST you can press F12 and gain access to it. I'm pretty sure that's how my Dell was.