Thinkpad T43 Finally died

Hey Guys,
I've had a Lenovo Thinkpad T43 for a LONG time, and at last, its design flaw caught up to me. How someone can be so stupid as to leave an uninsulated wire, whether its an antenna or not, loose on the motherboard is beyond me. Anywho, That wire somehow migrated and touched two terminals on the motherboard, frying it. Now I have some time critical files on that Hard drive, and i have to recover them ASAP. Now, my question is this: Can I connect that Hard drive (from the Thinkpad) to my Desktop, and use it effectively?
Also, is there any way I can boot from it? Use the OS and everything I have installed on it?

Thanks in Advance!

 

You will need to buy a 2.5" external enclosure with an ATA (assuming your HD interface here) to USB bridge.

You might be able to boot from it by plugging it into your desktop and using your BIOS to boot from your USB. If not, you can always recover the files using your desktop OS.

 

It depends on how you acquired your copy of Vista. If it's a retail copy you are well within your rights to install it on another machine. If it came with your notebook it likely does not include the right to move it to another machine. Please do not ask for help to commit piracy here. It is frowned upon greatly.

 

I remember when PCs came with a reinstall CD of Windows. This recovery partition crap really doesn't give much freedom.

Anyway, if you didnt have a hardrive password, then you can access it on other computers.

 

I recommend everyone who dares take the cover off their computers have one of these in their arsenal. It's so much easier than putting a drive in an enclosure or getting individual adapters to connect laptop drives to desktops and vice-versa.

ZaZ is of course right about running your ThinkPad's OS from the drive connected to another system. Given the differences in hardware between the two machines I can't imagine it would run acceptably even if it ran at all. So if you've got a legal retail copy of your OS, start a fresh install on a new hard drive and then use the adapter I mentioned (or one of several others, including getting an enclosure if you plan to use the drive permanently for storage) to copy your files between the systems.

 

Thanks for your quick replies guys, and, as I mentioned earlier, I bought this copy of Vista, meaning I went to the store and bought a hard copy of it, then installed it on my T43. Anyways, thanks again, i'm going to set about buying an adapter!

EDIT:. the T43 came with XP Professional

 

Is this really considered privacy if he just wants to boot to clean off the drive? I'm sure that falls under "not-quite-legal-but-not-quite-illegal"... Right? I mean if I had some crap that was encrypted and only that boot of XP/Vista could recover it, I doubt anyone would be upset if I booted it for 24 hours to clear it out? That's what he sounds like he was saying. I don't mean to threadjack or anything, I'm just curious as to how people would look at that. It's a moot point though here, since he's got a retail copy of Vista - he'd be well within his rights to just boot off that then, right?

 

I'm sure if he could get it to boot on a completely different system the MS Police wouldn't be able to arrest him in a timely fashion... but I assume that's at least a legal gray-area if not outright jailworthy You're right though, since he owns the retail copy it's a non-issue.

In my experience that never works well anyway (even for emergency rescue purposes) because of driver issues... typically the drive from another system won't boot completely anyway. But I haven't done it since the Windows 98 days, so perhaps vista is better at this.