copying files off of SATA Laptop Drive

My son's Dell Studio 17 won't boot after a recent vista upgrade. the
suggestion is to use the recovery dvd, which will wipe out his data
files (no, he did not back them up..different topic). It appears to
be a s/w issue not a hardware defect issue.

I see from Dells' website that the studios use SATA drives. So my plan
was to
1. remove the laptop hard drive
2. plug drive into a hdd enclosure, or a usb to SATA converter
3. connect the drive and adaptor to a 2nd computer
4. browse the laptop drive and pull of the files that he wants.
5. reinstall the drive into the laptop and do the recovery

Anyone see any problems with this?

Thanks!!!

Previously wrote:
My son's Dell Studio 17 won't boot after a recent vista upgrade. the
suggestion is to use the recovery dvd, which will wipe out his data
files (no, he did not back them up..different topic). It appears to
be a s/w issue not a hardware defect issue.

I see from Dells' website that the studios use SATA drives. So my plan
was to
1. remove the laptop hard drive
2. plug drive into a hdd enclosure, or a usb to SATA converter
3. connect the drive and adaptor to a 2nd computer
4. browse the laptop drive and pull of the files that he wants.
5. reinstall the drive into the laptop and do the recovery

Anyone see any problems with this?

Looks fine to me. This is what I would do also.

Arno

wrote:

My son's Dell Studio 17 won't boot after a recent vista upgrade.
the suggestion is to use the recovery dvd, which will wipe out
his data files (no, he did not back them up..different topic).
It appears to be a s/w issue not a hardware defect issue.

I see from Dells' website that the studios use SATA drives. So my plan was to
1. remove the laptop hard drive
2. plug drive into a hdd enclosure, or a usb to SATA converter
3. connect the drive and adaptor to a 2nd computer
4. browse the laptop drive and pull of the files that he wants.
5. reinstall the drive into the laptop and do the recovery

Anyone see any problems with this?

Nope, it should work fine. You can have a problem if he chose to encrypt any of the data when it was on the laptop tho.

On Sep 22, 3:37*pm, "Rod Speed" wrote:
wrote:
My son's Dell Studio 17 won't boot after a recent vista upgrade.
the suggestion is to use the recovery dvd, which will wipe out
his data files (no, he did *not back them up..different topic).
It appears to be a s/w issue not a hardware defect issue.
I see from Dells' website that the studios use SATA drives. So my plan was to
1. remove the laptop hard drive
2. plug drive into a hdd enclosure, or a usb to SATA converter
3. connect the drive and adaptor to a 2nd computer
4. browse the laptop drive and pull of the files that he wants.
5. reinstall the drive into the laptop and do the recovery
Anyone see any problems with this?

Nope, it should work fine. You can have a problem if he chose to encrypt any of the data when it was on the laptop tho.

So i bought a usb to sata/ide adaptor and tried a test sata drive that
i had plugged into a system here at home to see if this adaptor works
(son is at college a few hours away). 3 computers had the same
response.
1. i plug the usb cable in
2. each one recognizes that a usb to ide bridge was inserted
3. each one says mass storage device detected.
4. each one lists the drive under "safely remove hardware"
5. none of them brings up new letter for the drive
6. I dug a bit more deeply into one of the systems. the drive is
listed under device manager/diskdrives as a usb device. right click
properties/volumes its has disk 6, type =dynamic; status foreign,
partition style = master boot record; capacity 0, unallocated space 0,
reseved space 0, and in the volumes table, nothing is lsted
7. everything else under usb device properties looks normal/status ok

under computer management, the disk was listed as foreign with a
yellow triangle

i googled "foreign" disk and read about how a dynamic disk is tied to
a system that it was formatted on, and that i had to import the
foreigh disk under "Computer management". I did that and now i have a
letter drive for the test disk.

So not quite as simple as i wrote down....the disk i am going to try
to do this on is a vista boot disk..any other pitfalls i may run into?

But i read with concern that if my new host is windows XP home, then i
can't import the foreign disk but have to convert the dynamic disk to
a basic disk which will destroy the data on the dynamic disk.




to see if this thing works (son is at aand plugged the drive into
several computers and got

wrote
Rod Speed wrote
wrote

My son's Dell Studio 17 won't boot after a recent vista upgrade.
the suggestion is to use the recovery dvd, which will wipe out
his data files (no, he did not back them up..different topic).
It appears to be a s/w issue not a hardware defect issue.
I see from Dells' website that the studios use SATA drives. So my
plan was to
1. remove the laptop hard drive
2. plug drive into a hdd enclosure, or a usb to SATA converter
3. connect the drive and adaptor to a 2nd computer
4. browse the laptop drive and pull of the files that he wants.
5. reinstall the drive into the laptop and do the recovery
Anyone see any problems with this?

Nope, it should work fine. You can have a problem if he chose
to encrypt any of the data when it was on the laptop tho.

So i bought a usb to sata/ide adaptor and tried a test sata drive that
i had plugged into a system here at home to see if this adaptor works
(son is at college a few hours away). 3 computers had the same response.
1. i plug the usb cable in
2. each one recognizes that a usb to ide bridge was inserted
3. each one says mass storage device detected.
4. each one lists the drive under "safely remove hardware"
5. none of them brings up new letter for the drive

Because that particular drive was dynamic.

6. I dug a bit more deeply into one of the systems. the drive is
listed under device manager/diskdrives as a usb device. right click
properties/volumes its has disk 6, type =dynamic; status foreign,
partition style = master boot record; capacity 0, unallocated space 0,
reseved space 0, and in the volumes table, nothing is lsted

The drive was dynamic. The one you want to recover should not be.

7. everything else under usb device properties looks normal/status ok under
computer management, the disk was listed as foreign with a yellow triangle

i googled "foreign" disk and read about how a dynamic disk
is tied to a system that it was formatted on, and that i had
to import the foreigh disk under "Computer management".
I did that and now i have a letter drive for the test disk.

So not quite as simple as i wrote down....

Yes, but that problem shouldnt happen with the Dell drive.

the disk i am going to try to do this on is a vista boot disk..
any other pitfalls i may run into?

Just the one I already mentioned, that if the drive has Vista encrypted data on it, that can cause problems.

You can have an even bigger problem if he has chosen to use the ATA encryption too.

But i read with concern that if my new host is windows XP home,
then i can't import the foreign disk but have to convert the dynamic
disk to a basic disk which will destroy the data on the dynamic disk.

The Dell drive shouldnt be dynamic.

to see if this thing works (son is at aand plugged the drive into several computers and got

Whoops, a premature ejaculation. You can get medication for that apparently.

wrote...

My son's Dell Studio 17 won't boot after a recent vista upgrade. the
suggestion is to use the recovery dvd, which will wipe out his data
files (no, he did not back them up..different topic). It appears to
be a s/w issue not a hardware defect issue.

I see from Dells' website that the studios use SATA drives. So my plan
was to
1. remove the laptop hard drive
2. plug drive into a hdd enclosure, or a usb to SATA converter
3. connect the drive and adaptor to a 2nd computer
4. browse the laptop drive and pull of the files that he wants.
5. reinstall the drive into the laptop and do the recovery

There is a UBCD4Win (google it) which has drivers for SATA drives.
You need some effort to build a UBCD4Win bootable rescue CD yourself.
With your SATA drive in your laptop, boot the later up with the
UBCD4Win rescue CD. Hopefully you could access the files on your
SATA drive.

Previously wrote:
On Sep 22, 3:37*pm, "Rod Speed" wrote:
wrote:
My son's Dell Studio 17 won't boot after a recent vista upgrade.
the suggestion is to use the recovery dvd, which will wipe out
his data files (no, he did *not back them up..different topic).
It appears to be a s/w issue not a hardware defect issue.
I see from Dells' website that the studios use SATA drives. So my plan was to
1. remove the laptop hard drive
2. plug drive into a hdd enclosure, or a usb to SATA converter
3. connect the drive and adaptor to a 2nd computer
4. browse the laptop drive and pull of the files that he wants.
5. reinstall the drive into the laptop and do the recovery
Anyone see any problems with this?

Nope, it should work fine. You can have a problem if he chose to encrypt any of the data when it was on the laptop tho.

So i bought a usb to sata/ide adaptor and tried a test sata drive that
i had plugged into a system here at home to see if this adaptor works
(son is at college a few hours away). 3 computers had the same
response.
1. i plug the usb cable in
2. each one recognizes that a usb to ide bridge was inserted
3. each one says mass storage device detected.
4. each one lists the drive under "safely remove hardware"
5. none of them brings up new letter for the drive
6. I dug a bit more deeply into one of the systems. the drive is
listed under device manager/diskdrives as a usb device. right click
properties/volumes its has disk 6, type =dynamic; status foreign,
partition style = master boot record; capacity 0, unallocated space 0,
reseved space 0, and in the volumes table, nothing is lsted
7. everything else under usb device properties looks normal/status ok

under computer management, the disk was listed as foreign with a
yellow triangle

i googled "foreign" disk and read about how a dynamic disk is tied to
a system that it was formatted on, and that i had to import the
foreigh disk under "Computer management". I did that and now i have a
letter drive for the test disk.

So not quite as simple as i wrote down....the disk i am going to try
to do this on is a vista boot disk..any other pitfalls i may run into?

But i read with concern that if my new host is windows XP home, then i
can't import the foreign disk but have to convert the dynamic disk to
a basic disk which will destroy the data on the dynamic disk.

Ah, the joy of comerceware. Before you do that, you should make a backup
copy with a sector-imager.

Arno