Question for people on here.

I have a laptop with a broken CD drive. Its not cost effective to replace the hard drive, so I want to move the hard drive from the laptop onto my PC to install an O/S then put the hard drive back in my laptop!

Question, I need to get hold some kind of cable to convert 2.5" ide to 3.5" - anyone know where I can get hold of one?

Cheers,
Shaun

I saw these in Maplin last night (looking for a male -> female IDE converter, of course they didn't have one of those :/)

But yeah they do exist and if Maplin have them I'd be surprised if you couldn't get them from eBay or most online computer shops.

Hope that helps,

Maplins sell them. I've got 1 that I used to get data from my laptop Hard Disk. I don't think you'll be able to install the OS on the PC and then move the drive back to the laptop as all the boot/configuration would be for the PC and not for the laptop. Suppose you could try it though!

another thought... What about a USB CD-ROM drive attached to your laptop? You could then install the OS from the laptop onto the laptop...

2nd hand CD rom drive form Ebay wont cost much.

The bios on the laptop won't support booting from external cd, or from a memory stick unfortunately. I'm looking for a drive for a model Toshiba Satellite pro A40, so yes, will be trawling ebay just in case!

The bios on the laptop won't support booting from external cd, or from a memory stick unfortunately. I'm looking for a drive for a model Toshiba Satellite pro A40, so yes, will be trawling ebay just in case!

I always thought that most laptop CD or DVD drives were pretty much of a standard size? Find someone with a dead laptop and see if you can salvage their drive. At the very least the connector will be the same, even if it doesn't fit.

The only problem with installing the OS on another computer, is that Windows loads drivers and utilities specific to the motherboard/hardware used, and starts having hiccups when you change everything. It'd be a much smoother install if you did it on the laptop.

There's a wealth of information on installing without a CD drive at:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installation_on_ThinkPads_without_CD-ROM_drive

It's a bit of hassle but you won't need the adapter, and just think how 1337 you'll feel once you've done it.

Hope that helps,

The only problem with installing the OS on another computer, is that Windows loads drivers and utilities specific to the motherboard/hardware used, and starts having hiccups when you change everything. It'd be a much smoother install if you did it on the laptop.

I've done this before, its pretty easy - you just have to whip the hard drive out of the pc at the point it reloads just prior to setting hardware up on your pc, put it into the computer you actually want to install on.