Is there a way to connect a laptop harddrive to a regular computer, so i can mount it

abefroman · 08-03-2005, 08:24 AM

Is there a way to connect a laptop harddrive to a regular computer, so i can mount it, make a clone and look through it with autopsy?

sundialsvcs · 08-03-2005, 08:34 AM

Most laptop disk drives are small-size IDE drives that can be installed into an external disk-drive carrier. Check your local computer store. I have a nice USB pocket-drive, and you can easily take the thing apart, remove the drive that's in it now and pop-in one from any laptop. Does terrible things for the pocket drive's warranty

but who-cares. It's great for forensics.

KimVette · 08-03-2005, 10:04 AM

Even cheaper and easier:
Get a 3.5" to 2.5" IDE adapter. Most are straight IDE so you may need to cut or bend a pin to convert it to EIDE, but that's simple.

I have two of these adapters and I use them all the time for disk imaging and for recovering data from customer laptops (usually walk-in customers who were too cheap to buy antivirus software for their computers and used MSIE rather than Firefox).

Note: this introduces a couple of advantages (quite a few actually):

Access the drive as a native ATA device
Lower CPU utilization than USB
no futzing with flaky USB support
faster transfer rates