[Animal-Finder]

Hello,

I have an old Acer laptop running Windows XP and it has basically died on me. It freezes at about 11% on chkdsk and skipping chkdsk restarts it, it's an endless spiral. So although most of my files are backed up, there are a few important emails and files on my desktop that I really need. Is it possible to connect my new Acer laptop running on Vista to my old one and use my old laptop as an external hard drive, long enough for me to get my files?

Any help with this would be really awesome!

[Advertisements]

Hi Animal-Finder.

You can take the laptop hard drive out or your old laptop, buy an external casing for it and attach it to your new Laptop via a USB cable. The only potential problem with this is that when Vista finds the new hardware, it may not allow you access the files if there is problem with the drive. i.e. it may register the drive as "unhealthy".

(If you have any friends who are into PC maintenance, they may well have an IDE cable convertor, which would allow you attach a laptop hard drive to a desktop computer, so maybe check that option out too)

Another potential fix is to find out the manufacturer of the hard drive and download their hard disk utilities. Most manufacturers offer the utility in an .iso file format. Burn this .iso image to a CD from your new laptop.
If you place this CD into your old laptop and set the boot order to boot from the CD first, this will run the manufacturers diagnostic on the hard drive at startup.

I would give the latter option a try first, as that way is free!

Let me know how you get on.

[S_t_r_y_k_e_r]

Hi Animal-Finder.

You can take the laptop hard drive out or your old laptop, buy an external casing for it and attach it to your new Laptop via a USB cable. The only potential problem with this is that when Vista finds the new hardware, it may not allow you access the files if there is problem with the drive. i.e. it may register the drive as "unhealthy".

(If you have any friends who are into PC maintenance, they may well have an IDE cable convertor, which would allow you attach a laptop hard drive to a desktop computer, so maybe check that option out too)

Another potential fix is to find out the manufacturer of the hard drive and download their hard disk utilities. Most manufacturers offer the utility in an .iso file format. Burn this .iso image to a CD from your new laptop.
If you place this CD into your old laptop and set the boot order to boot from the CD first, this will run the manufacturers diagnostic on the hard drive at startup.

I would give the latter option a try first, as that way is free!

Let me know how you get on.

[Animal-Finder]

Thanks a lot I will try those out and let you know how I do.