I have an otherwise working laptop which had it's harddrive fail. Getting IDE harddrives is like buying large gold coins! If you can find them.

I am thinking of booting off a USB stick, and perhaps embedding that physically in the laptop.

Are there any other strategies for getting IDE drives? Or using other drives in the IDE slot with a super-small adapter?

I hate to see an otherwise good machine hit the junk pile.

If you don't want to buy an IDE drive you can either boot from USB or buy an adapter from IDE to CF-cards. CF-cards aren't fast, but cheap, as is the adapter.

I use an IDE to SD card adapter in an old laptop. You can find IDE to compact flash adapters as well. They are only a few dollars on EBay, and work well.

1 members found this post helpful.

I use an IDE to SD card adapter in an old laptop. You can find IDE to compact flash adapters as well. They are only a few dollars on EBay, and work well.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks guys. Two better ideas than I had.

I don't recommend buying a laptop IDE drive. I bought one, it cost a lot, and it was broken when I got it. Depending on the laptop it may or may not be able to boot from USB or other media. Mine can't so that won't work. I'll just donate it to someone. If I had to keep it I would have to use a live CD/DVD and save to a USB HDD or flash media. The only problem is that the DVD drive is not working properly. One RAM stick has failed, and the other will fail soon with no possibility of replacement (it won't boot with the new one). The LCD screen flickers often, and is likely to fail soon. The HDD SMART parameters show that it isn't too far from failure either.

Along with the cf,sd or other flash media.
There are stores that offer sort of cheap replacement ide drives if you want to take the chance. I think this place even offers a sort of warranty on some products. discoutelectronics.com

There are also ssd's in ide available and sata to ide adapters but I doubt they'd fit.

Several months ago I remember looking and pricing out IDE drives. New ones were expensive, and there were used ones which were also expensive.

After looking into IDE adapters for SF, and also for SD memory, and pricing them out, I stumbled upon a vendor advertising his product for industrial automation equipment. A 32GB PATA (IDE 44-pin) drive was $53. Seems reasonable, so I will get one. Honestly, I didn't see these before. Some more recognized name brand units are also available but at much steeper prices.

I will mark this as SOLVED, but if anyone else stumbles upon better solutions, perhaps they can chime in.

Oh, a 64GB is $80. The ebay vendor publishes a data sheet which also gives the expected performance over time.

Thanks everyone.