Harddrive from a dead Thinkpad 770 - what USB adapter to use

[smomma]

Hello,
I have an old TP770, apparently dead (and at the moment, I can't invest much time in attempts to resurrect it). However, I would like to access the data on its hard drive, which is a 5.1GB IBM disk, FRU P/N 12J0449.
I was wondering whether there are USB adapters that can connect this type of hard drive (I don't really recognize what type of interface this is on the drive). Any recommendations?
Would such an adapter also work, if the hard drive had a password set (which I believe it does)?

Thanks a lot for your help in advance!

-- stefan

[Brad]

Welcome to the Forum!

Sorry the 770 is not working.

The drive will have to be removed from its caddy. I would get a USB to IDE cable as the drive could be too thick to fit a normal enclosure.

Brad

[JasonC]

I was wondering whether there are USB adapters that can connect this type of hard drive (I don't really recognize what type of interface this is on the drive). Any recommendations?

The interface is EIDE. It's PATA, which was a common interface before SATA. It used those wide ribbon cables you might have seen in older desktops.

Anyways: http://bit.ly/W6bDjq As Brad mentioned, go for a cable over an enclosure (although if you have an enclosure and the drive physically doesn't fit in it, sometimes you can remove the connector and circuitry from the enclosure, or you can just break it with a hack saw or a hammer [but yeah, seriously]). Please note, I can't speak for any of the adapters in that Google shopping result, I just typed in the search terms. 2.5" EIDE drives generally have 4 extra pins for power (44-pin as opposed to the larger drives with 40-pin connectors and a separate ATX power jack), so make sure the adapter you get is suitable for use with 2.5" drives, or notebook drives, or however they word it in their marketing.

Good luck!

Admin edit: Removed discussion of technique to bypass hard drive password. Please re-read the fourm's rules, especially #5 under Compulsory Rules:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=14339

[smomma]

Thanks a lot for your help so far. I knew I was coming to the right place with this
I removed the drive from its caddy, and found a standard IDE 40 (+4) pin connector on it.
So I got myself a LogiLink IDE-USB adapter, and the good news is that the drive powers up fine (a bit noisy, but still ok, I guess), and the Ubuntu Disk Utility appears to recognize the drive, so something still appears to be working. Yay!
It still doesn't show the partitions on it yet, which is the works of the BIOS password (which I know) being set, I guess. So that'll be the next challenge (outside of this forum).

Thanks again, and a Happy New Year to everyone!

Cheers,
-- stefan

[wkw]

A bios password isn't the kind of password that would lock the hard drive.

Power on passwords would prevent the machine from booting at all
bios/adin passwords only prevent accessing/modifying the bios (depends on the machine)
hdd passwords prevent the disk from being read or written to, and in many cases, can only be unlocked by the computer that set them.


If you set the hdd password to abc123, you would have pressed those letters in that order, but there is no telling if the computer sends the code to the hard drive as tyuwer..

So if you put a password on the disk and you can not use the pc that set it to unlock it, or you don't know the password, you now have a paperweight