About a year ago, I started having all sorts of problems with my ThinkPad R32. I misdiagnosed it as a hard drive error, got halfway through the refresh process, and the system board went out - I'm calling this stupidity on my part, since it was the third one. Swapped hard drives into another computer and tried to run the process again, but it wouldn't work. I called IBM and got them to send another recovery CD (the recovery partition wasn't working), but the hard drive seemed to be asking for a full version of Windows.

I'd now really like to get the data off the hard drive. I suspect nothing is wrong with it other than the fact there's no OS loaded. I did try to install both Windows NT and a few flavors of Linux, but I'm guessing they're not compatible with something because they wouldn't load. Obviously I don't want to shell out money for a version of Windows, since I have a new computer and just want the data.

Someone told me I could set up the "bad" hard drive as a slave to my current computer. Is this possible? How does this work? And if not, is there any other way to get the data off the old hard drive?

See if this helps:

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

Originally Posted by jephree

See if this helps:

It does...but I don't have a desktop and neither does anyone else I know. Any way to connect it to another notebook?

You can use an external USB case for a 2.5" drive (laptop) such as:

http://www.priorityelectronics.com/s...bt-esu25-1.htm

Due to possible proprietary connections you might need to verify the exact connections between the drive and the case.

Once installed in the case the connection to the other laptop would be USB cable.