Use 3.5" drive on laptop

The only solution I can think of is to get a PCMCIA sata card and use that to connect to an external sata enclosure. BTW, what did you mean by "different OS" ?

Stuart

Hi, I want to have different operating systems on the laptop, but without using the multiboot options nad having partitions, so i have spare 3.5" drives and wanted to use these for experimenting with the operating systems while still ahving my normal config on the 2.5 internal hard drive.

Can laptops load from PCMCIA?

Dumb idea.

well well well... what a great contribution... great stuff...

well does your laptop support booting from usb, you could get an external enclosure

if you do this, i would make sure the boot sector is on the internal laptop drive so when you take it somewhere you can still boot from it (aka if using xp and win7, install xp first on the external then win7 on the laptop drive)

The SATA plug is the same, but you'd need to supply it with a separate power source. Laptops supply their drives with 3.3V and 5V power, while desktop drives also require a 12V.

Forgot to mention, its IDE, not SATA

If your laptop will boot from usb, then an external enclosure will be your best bet. I used to have an adapter to put laptop drives in a desktop but they are few and far between, and I'venever seen the the one your looking for.

I know the ide cables are smaller, and the laptop has integrated power in the ide cable.
I'm fairly sure that notebook sata is also mini unless you have an e-sata.
You could also consider a network boot seen them before but never set one up.