Internal to external

[lizzie_stokes]

Hi

I am trying to open up my internal hard drive that i had in my laptop,
I have put it into a case. and it works. however it only opens one part for the drive as it has been partitioned, it will open drive d. however i need to open drive c (this has the OS installed on this part)
I have even tried booting from this drive on my new laptop, but it doesnt manage it. it crashes...

I there anything else i can try?

Thanks

 

[PatHIverson]

You hard drive speeds may have different rpm's, if so you need an operating system on a primary drive with the same rpm's.

Come see me at indiana web design company.

 

[elel]

You hard drive speeds may have different rpm's, if so you need an operating system on a primary drive with the same rpm's.

No, rpm doesn't matter.
Is D: a recovery partition? If so, I am not surprised that it seems to be the primary one, and that it doesn't boot on a different computer. You just need to tell the new operating system that the partition is there, and that it should assign a drive letter to it. Which version of windows do you have?

 

[lizzie_stokes]

I have windows vista which is on both drives. I'm not sure if it is a recovery partition, if this helps.... when i've done a system re-install drive d has kept all of its files. which would just be mine like music etc.

How do i tell the operating system it is there?

Cheers

 

[pepperman]

If I'm reading this correctly, you are trying to take the HDD from your old laptop and use it as a primary in a new laptop. If this is correct, unless both laptops are the same model number, this will not work due to the nature of OS installations: bottom line you will need to reinstall your OS (which means all the data on the HDD will be lost, so you will need to back it up). If your old laptop is still functioning, you can put your data on a usb flash drive/external HDD/CDs/DVDs and transfer them back after the OS re-installation.

If I am interpreting your situation incorrectly, please tell me.

 

[andrewpdx]

Hi

I am trying to open up my internal hard drive that i had in my laptop,
I have put it into a case. and it works. however it only opens one part for the drive as it has been partitioned, it will open drive d. however i need to open drive c (this has the OS installed on this part)
I have even tried booting from this drive on my new laptop, but it doesnt manage it. it crashes...

Your old drive will not show up as the C: letter when you attach the drive to another computer. It will show up as some other drive letter on the new computer, just to be clear. So when you go to Computer you see only one of the partitions showing up as a new drive letter?

To see how the various partitions have been mapped on your new computer (or the one you attached it to), go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tasks -> Computer Management -> Disk Management and look for the drive there. You should see each partition (it's probably going to be Disk 1). You might be able to right-click on the partition you wish to view and re-map the drive letter to another one.

 

[lizzie_stokes]

Your old drive will not show up as the C: letter when you attach the drive to another computer. It will show up as some other drive letter on the new computer, just to be clear. So when you go to Computer you see only one of the partitions showing up as a new drive letter?

To see how the various partitions have been mapped on your new computer (or the one you attached it to), go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tasks -> Computer Management -> Disk Management and look for the drive there. You should see each partition (it's probably going to be Disk 1). You might be able to right-click on the partition you wish to view and re-map the drive letter to another one.

Thank you i have got the files i needed now. Is there a chance you could tell me how i can get both partitions merged together, so i can use it as an external drive for back-ups. as this is alot better to use for traveling unlike my other external hard drive.

Thanks again for your help.

 

[andrewpdx]

Thank you i have got the files i needed now. Is there a chance you could tell me how i can get both partitions merged together, so i can use it as an external drive for back-ups. as this is alot better to use for traveling unlike my other external hard drive.

Thanks again for your help.

If you don't need any of the files anymore on the old laptop hard drive and want to start clean, you can just delete all the existing partitions on the laptop drive and make a new single partition using all the space on the drive. Just go into Disk Management as described here. Make sure you are deleting partitions from the correct disk! (the laptop drive, NOT the one in the computer currently booted up!). You can do all of this in Disk Management.

Of course, this assumes you are completely done with everything on that laptop drive and will never need to boot it again! It will erase the operating system and everything else on that laptop drive, so you need to be sure!

If you want to keep some of the old files on your laptop drive - maybe the operating system so you could, if need be, boot that laptop drive again - you could delete just one of the partitions - I assume the one that had your data on it - and then grow the other partition to use all of that new free space on the drive. You can again do this in Disk Management in Vista or Windows 7 (not XP though).

One caution about using an old laptop drive for backup: you need to make sure the old drive is in fact good! You didn't say what happened to your old laptop(?) but if by chance the disk started to fail (but was still readable to get files off) you wouldn't want to use it for backup! I use a free tool called Crystal Disk Info (google for it) to check the S.M.A.R.T. status of my hard drives. If you check the status of your laptop drive with this tool and it says "Good" status, then you are pretty safe in using that laptop drive for backup.