Hard disk motherboards interchangeable?

[Jonny69]

Got a 40Gb Hitachi Travelstar out of an IBM Thinkpad but the filesystem has gone borko. Was going to stick my EIDE to USB converter on it to recover the data before I kill it with a format and reinstall but it's got some silly connector on it instead of the normal pins and it's not something that slides onto the pins, it's actually part of the hard-disk motherboard.

My question: I have a couple of other Travelstars in 20Gb and a thicker 11mm 60Gb model. Can I swap on the motherboard of one of my other disks? Then I might be able to get my data back.

 

[rpstewart]

What does the connector look like? Some of the Thinpad drives came in wee caddies with an edge connector on the long side of the package but you could dismantle them and the drive was standard inside.

 

[Jonny69]

My badness, it's actually a SATA connector. I'll have to plug it in direct on a desktop.

Who's clever idea was it to use a SATA disk on a computer that won't benefit from SATA and comes with no floppy drive so you can't diagnose it?