2.5" To 3.5" adapter problems

ScarySquirrel

ScarySquirrel

ScarySquirrel

Soldato
Joined
13 Jan 2004
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Hello, my girlfriends laptop broke and she wanted all her stuff off the HDD so I got an adapter for about a fiver off, set it all up and plugged it in to my PC in the second IDE slot.

In my PC I have two SATA HDD's already. When I tried to boot, I can see all 3 drives in the BIOS, but the laptop HDD shows as IDE Master and when I boot to windows it freezes on the Windows Screen (before desktop)

The HDD is from a Compaq laptop and has no jumpers that I can see so I cannot set it as a slave drive.

I tried connecting it to the primary IDE slot but when I do that I can't see my SATA drives in the BIOS and it tries to boot from the laptop HDD which results in a Boot Failure of some kind.

Does anyone know how I can run the HDD as a slave so I can boot onto my normal windows installation on my SATA drive and get the info off the laptop drive.

Any help is greatly appreciated, especially as she did the washing up in return for me doing this and I haven't yet suceeded :(
 
The master/slave concept is only used to define which of the two drives on an IDE channel is doing the controlling for the pair, not which is the main drive in a system. Therefore in your case the 2.5" drive needs to stay as the master on it's own channel.

When you have the drive attached to the second IDE channel how far through the boot process can you get? Do you see the XP logo screen at all?
 
Well I have a slightly modified Windows so I can't compare where it is to a normal windows as it all looks different when it starts up. It is the first screen after the POST process though (if that makes sense) on normal windows I think it would be the black screen with the Windows Logo and the blue loading bar in the bottom centre of the screen.

Do you think it is just all a bit confused and that is why it is refusing to boot.

I know I shouldn't have done this but I tried booting without the laptop HDD in and then plugged it in once booted but nothing happened (and I didn't die)
 
You should be still able to retreive data from the HD even though it's slave, with no master HD connected.

My HTPC has a 2.5" IDE HD used for boot, using 2.5" to 3.5" adaptor. Have you connected the molex connector?

Laptop_IDE_IDEK_connect.jpg
 
Yeah the molex is connected, as I said it can be seen in the BIOS. I just won't boot whenever it is plugged in.

I notice in that picture that those two extra pins it says Master Slave. How do I force it to boot as a slave? Or is that not the problem here?
 
Some 2.5" hard drives have been flashed firmware as slave, so it's possible you'll need firmware for your drive that's coded as master.
 
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