Laptop Hard Drives - SATA vs. PATA & restoring the OS

[Leonardo]

Forgive my ignorance of new generation laptops...

I'm looking at what appears to be a really good deal for a laptop on my local Craigslist - http://anchorage.craigslist.org/sys/1004106755.html. This sale includes a retail XP Home CD. The original hard drive on this machine is dead. I'm assuming this machine has an SATA hdd format, right? Well, I'm interested in trying to salvage the restore partition on his old hard drive if I can, and put it on a new drive.

1. If I copied it to a new drive, would it still be recognized by the computer as a restore partition?

2. Can I hook up a laptop SATA hard drive directly to a standard SATA cable on a PC, or would I need a laptop SATA adaptor and/or power adapter?

3. Do you think there would difficulties finding XP drivers for this laptop, as it apparently is designed for XP?

[kryyst]

laptop sata connectors are the same.

If you ghosted the drive you should have access to the restore partition on the new drive. But that's all dependent on what the word 'dead' really means wrt that drive.

[Leonardo]

So, then I infer that I would need to image (if possible) the entire partition, and not just copy it to another hard drive?

[Thrax]

Correct.

[QCH]

Toshiba's are not in my circle of trust... They can be a pain to setup from scratch. Toshiba doesn't have the greatest download support. As for the dead hard drive, I have lost a Toshiba that masked the real problem behind a dead hard drive.

I'd try a Bootable CD/ DVD that can stress test the laptop to make sure it is stable.

[Leonardo]

Thanks, guys. I'm game for more advice if you have it. What I'm looking for is a reasonably competent laptop for travel - Internet, email, light office usage, digital photo storage and review (but not editing) - stuff like that.

Concerning the Toshiba in question, it still has the Toshiba warranty for several more months. Buyer claims he just bought it two months ago. He has the original box and Toshiba documentation, but not the sales receipt. He booted it for me and the motherboard and BIOS appeared to be intact, but yeah, without going into an OS that's just a best guess.

[Leonardo]

Woohoo!! Well, I bought the Toshiba Satellite (L355D-S7825) from the Craigslist seller. $250 for the laptop (only two months old) and a free retail, unused copy of Vista Premium Upgrade + $69 for a new hard drive.

It's now repaired and running Vista Premium, and I didn't even need to do the Windows installation process. As it turned out, in the original packaging/box, there was a 2-CD recovery set, still sealed. I had asked him yesterday if there was a restore partition on the bad drive or if there was "recovery" media. He didn't know and didn't seem to care. When I picked up the laptop today from him, there it was, the recovery set, right in box, undisturbed from when he purchased the computer. This machine is two months old and only required a new hard drive. Now I can sell the Vista Premium Upgrade disk and RMA the original hard drive. Term of the day is fat rat!

Ohhh...also got to learn Vista now. OK, I wanted to do that anyway.

[Leonardo]

Specifications here (http://tech.yahoo.com/ps/toshiba-satellite-l355d-s7825/1995931585).

No, it's not a speed demon, but considering that I had thought I would end up with a five year old single core Dell or Compaq, I just can't complain at all. 17" screen, too!