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November 19th, 2008 13:00
Inspiron Hard Disk Question
I have a dead Inspiron 6000 (I dumped wine on the keyboard while it was on). I need to find out if the hard drive still works. It doesn't appear I got any wine on the hard drive when I took it apart.
My question: My sister has an Inspiron E1505. Can I simply take out the hard drive in my system and hers and plug my disk drive into her system and turn it on? Not sure if it matters, my system was XP, hers Vista.
mhagan
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jackshack
6.4K Posts
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November 19th, 2008 14:00
Sorry, it's not possible. Your Inspiron 6000 uses a parallel ATA (IDE) interface, while the E1505 uses a SATA interface for the hard drive. You could, however, purchase a USB drive shell, install the drive from the Inspiron 6000 into it, and attach it to a working computer to retrieve the data from it.
mhagan
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November 20th, 2008 02:00
Thank you Jack for your post. Always better to ask before doing something stupid.
I'll persue the USB drive shell. I'm not very technical. Is there a particular brand or type of USB shell I need to ask for? Is this something I could get at a place like Radio Shack?
One additional question. I'm considering buying a used 6000 (ebay, etc). Can I purchase any Dell Inspiron 6000 and simply swap out the hard drive with mine or do I need to purchase a particular type of 6000?
Thanks again for your help.
mhagan
husky0894
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November 20th, 2008 04:00
If you want to just plug the drive in and go, you need one with the same type of video (integrated or ATI X300) you have now - however, it doesn't make much sense to buy a used 6000 just to re-use a hard drive. That's kind of like buying a used car so you can re-use the wheel cover from your old one!
TheRealFireblad
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4.6K Posts
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November 20th, 2008 04:00
You can use any USB external enclosure which accepts IDE (/PATA) drives.
Alternatively... buy one which can accept both/either IDE or SATA drives - such that... should you need to... you can swap out an IDE drive, and stick in a SATA drive :emotion-5:
As for where to buy one: You can order them from the Radio Shack website, certainly, so if your local Radio Shack store is a decent size, they *may* have some in stock?
You may also be able to find them in other high street stores which sell PC hardware/software/accessories (i.e. PC World), and almost all (good) online PC stores sell them.
They're also available from Amazon, and on Ebay.
Some of the better ones can be relatively expensive, but you don't need to spend a lot on an enclosure... especially if you're only going to use it occasionally - i.e. just to fit a drive to get data/files off it.
Do you mean taking the hard drive out, and reformatting it? If you intend doing that - and as long as it's an IDE drive, it'll be OK.
But you can't take out a hard drive out which has drivers and software installed on it from one system, and expect it boot your system.
That will only work if the hardware in each system is exactly the same.