I have a few old laptop hard drives laying around. Some still have an OS loaded on them. Can I install the laptop hard drive into a desktop and be able to format the drive and then use it as a storage drive? If so, what is the correct procedure for this.
Depending on the age of the drive, it could be straight sata cables or adaptor cables for IDE and power.
You'll want 2.5 to 3.5 or 5 1/4 cages to secure it in your case I you don't have 2.5" slots.
Holy crap it's Cryptosporidium!
All told though I can only back up what Cypt- Zepher has said. A laptop drive is 2.5in while a desktop drive is 3.5in, so you'll be wanting a 2.5 - 3.5 adapter to allow you to install it in your desktop's ordinary HDD cage.
Alternately a 5.25 bay is what you stick your-... Optical drives in, so an adapter from 2.5 - 5.25 will let you put your laptop drive up where the big boys live.
And depending on your board you will need, as stated, a plain SATA cable (and power), a plain IDE cable, or a convertor from IDE - SATA.
Another option that some people like to use is to employ a simple enclosure. You put your laptop drive inside of a housing with the right connector inside, then plug this into a free USB port to act like a store-bought external hard drive. Simples! :) /comparethemeerkat.com
After you connect them, just make sure the BIOS is set to boot from the right HDD.
Otherwise you are doing some serious nekro and resurrecting the old OS in a new "body". Which will likely crash before reaching desktop.
When I do this I usually stick Partition Wizard boot CD in the optical drive, shut down the PC, connect the 2-1/2" (with proper adapter tray, SATA cable, etc), then boot directly into PW and format the drive from there, being sure to remove the active flag from the OS partition too.
This just seems easier to me then dealing with any potential "Windows Issues" with booting and 2 OS's.
And I always run the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic on the "new" drive after formatting to check it out before storing data on it.
Hope that helps.
For SATA HDDs I use a Thermaltake BlacX USB 2/eSata HDD dock to connect older drives to my system. It will hold either a 3.5 or 2.5 HDD.
Absolutely no issue what so ever as long as you have a free IDE or Sata ports and can get power to the new drives. This is what I use and I love it.
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