My laptop took a long nap after it shut off and never turned back on (virus issue most likely) Will not boot in safe mode.. regardless, I have 100 gigs of Data I dont want to lose on the HD but I have to install the OS again. This is the second time this happened, I have a 40 to 44 PIN adapter to attach the laptop hd to my Desktop hd to transfer the data. Last time I did this I lost the laptop hd...it fried it for some reason and I had to replace it with this 100 gig which wasnt cheap. I dont want this to happen again so im asking for any knowledgeable folks to offer some advice. Thank you.

A safer, albeit slower, method is to use an USB external enclosure.

This and some other ideas seen in the comments section to this article:

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com...1-5160538.html

Thank you Jephree but I was looking more towards an answer to use this adapter safely without frying the HD again, maybe the procedures, and not have to go out and buy another adapter..

From what I read the risk is inherent in the procedure.

The article above describes the procedure in detail.

I attached the laptop HD to where the IDE cable connects to my second hard drive (slave) and the computer will not boot from the original desktop HD, it says theres a problem and to press f11 for recovery. When I disconnect the laptop HD and the second desktop HD and leave those unplugged the machine boots fine as usual?? From what I can tell the drives are setup in the correct order in bios I have not changed anything so what could be the problem?

Did you change the jumper from Master to slave on the laptop drive (if it has one)?

I would suggest attaching the laptop drive as secondary master (take the connection from your DVD/CD drive and plug in the laptop drive) as the secondary master.

In this case make sure the BIOS is set to boot the Primary hard drive first.

In other words do not have the DVD/CD drive (or secondary channel) in the boot menu.

I still cannot get the harddrive to show up on this desktop. I tried attaching it to the pci ide card I have, it has 2 slots, one I use for the cd/dvd and the other one is empty so I tried and nothing. I unplugged the ide cable from the dvd drive since I know this is working and plugged the power connector from it into the laptop hd, then the cable and again, nothing shows up. Does not appear to be a way to change slave/master on the hd. Nevertheless, this desktop has the hd it boots from and a slave hd anyway, so when I connect the laptop drive to that one I should be seeing something, no?

During any of these configurations is this drive detected in the BIOS Setup?

no, when I disconnect the second desktop hd the machine boots fine, when I try to add the laptop hd at that location and boot up, it says no hard drive was found so somethings not right...getting close to giving up and just reinstalling the OS but I have a years worth of information on there!!!!

Yet that is an indication that the BIOS detects it. It appears as the BIOS is trying to boot the laptop drive or at least boot that channel. The laptop drive is causing an interruption of some sort.

If you put it back on the PCI IDE card and enter the BIOS Setup (usually press Delete after power on) is the drive detected?

If you put it on the PCI IDE card does your regular drive boot?

If the BIOS sees this drive then there must be a configuration where Windows will.