Trying to load a working hard drive to get data off my laptop via USB port

[halomaster56]

my hard drive on my laptop seemed to crash. So i took my WORKING hard drive out of my desktop and figured i could load windows and get all of the data off the other hard drive hopefully, and even error check it and get it working, but the hard drive that i know for a fact works will get to the end of loading and will not start the OS. any tips on where to look, its gotta be something in the laptop

I pretty tech savvy most days so i dont want to take it somewhere, to find out what i know already
and its an old ide 2.5 hard drive so my usb hard drive kit wont even work with it cause it doesnt get enough power go figure

 

[buwish]

I think the easiest solution here would be to buy a cheap enclosure and get your files off of it. I'm sure you can find a cheapie IDE enclosure around the net.

 

[jitpublisher]

You cannot take a hard drive with an OS installed on it and move it from computer to computer and expect it to work. It will work sometimes if both systems are very, very close to exactly the same. But even then it is a long process to get everything going, and it still can be very buggy. Trying to go from a desktop to laptop is a big FAIL. It simply does not work that way.

What you should have done is exactly the opposite. Take your notebook hard drive and install it as secondary drive in your still working computer.

I would not be surprised if you find when you put your main drive back into your desktop now, it won't boot there any longer either.