Shit... The hardrives totaled...

[Silicate Wielder]

(Sorry, I posted in the wrong section, could an OP please move this to TJP?)

Okay last night I was attempting to transfer my backed up data from my mom's laptop to my own. and well DOS decided to just burn all the data.

Please note my mom's laptop has been on the verge of dying for the past 6 months with it randomly crashing and overheating severly.

Last night, as I said, I was attempting to transfer my data from my mom's laptop to the one I got for christmas and I did this by Removing the hardrive from my own laptop and plugging it into my mom's using a Sata/ATA/IDE to USB adaptor, anyways I had to spend about half an hour trying to figure out why my mom's laptop wouldn't turn on and when I finally got to start up I got an error involving some hardware along the lines of "Realtek PCIE Family" so I decided to boot into ubuntu using my flashdrive and do the transfer that way, no luck. the Disk partition manager couldn't even detect my mom's internal hardrive.
and it turns out the hardrive isn't getting power or something went wrong.
So my mom is pissed with me thinking i did something to her laptop to do this and I can't even get her to listen to me when I try to explain what happened.

Does anyone know what might be the issue, I think the hardrive might have been damaged somehow because I can't seem to get it to power on like it usually does when I plug it into the adaptor.

not to mention since I tried the file transfer I have a few files missing and corrupt files here and there on my own laptop

[CharlieHorse]

Put your harddrive back in your computer and take out her harddrive and try the transfer. Make her harddrive the external one.

[Mirage]

We're not OP's, this isn't Minecraft ;)

But sure :D

:arrow: TJP

[Silicate Wielder]

Put your harddrive back in your computer and take out her harddrive and try the transfer. Make her harddrive the external one.

I tried that already. besides her laptop is designed for SATA drives, mine is designed for ATA drives. Big difference

[Archimedes]

Double check connection between adapder and HDD, try connecting external power supply to adaper. Seems your mother's laptop just not able to give enough power. Or connect your mother's HDD to new laptop. If nothing will help, you can transfer files via LAN network. Slower, but works.

[Silicate Wielder]

I've tried using my own external adapter (it comes with a powersupply) and It won't even give the sound it makes when it has trouble starting, Could the hardrive have died early? we just got this about a year ago. and most of our laptops last atleast 5 years before we get these issues. although in my case I keep my laptop running smoothly through maintenance.

[TheMatrix]

I've tried using my own external adapter (it comes with a powersupply) and It won't even give the sound it makes when it has trouble starting
Try any other desktop computer with a compatible plug.

Could the hardrive have died early? we just got this about a year ago. and most of our laptops last atleast 5 years before we get these issues. although in my case I keep my laptop running smoothly through maintenance.

Well, apparently that maintenance wasn't good enough :P
Usually disks show some form of dying before they completely go. But I hope you have sufficient backups -- you'll obviously be needing them now. Buy yourself a new hard drive(s), they're dirt-cheap nowadays.

[Silicate Wielder]

no I don't bother doing maintenance on my moms because it just pisses her off, she's afraid I'll ruin it and now that it has died when I was trying to transfer my files to my new laptop I'm not even aloud to touch it because she's I'll break it "even more".

[HunterSteele]

Check the boot order in the BIOS of your mom's laptop. If it was set to boot from USB before the internal hard drive, that would be why it's not starting up. Does it start if you detach the hard drive from your new laptop?

in my case I keep my laptop running smoothly through maintenance.
I don't know what kind of maintenance you do, but you can't keep a hard drive from failing. It might happen in a few years or it might not happen during the life of the computer. But they all do eventually.

no I don't bother doing maintenance on my moms because it just pisses her off, she's afraid I'll ruin it and now that it has died when I was trying to transfer my files to my new laptop I'm not even aloud to touch it because she's I'll break it "even more".
For someone who's primary method of transferring files is to remove the drive from the computer and use a USB enclosure, that's probably fair. Why don't you use an external hard drive? Or a crossover cable?

[Silicate Wielder]

yeah I know you can't do maintenance on a hardrive other than defragging it and such
I usually tweak the OS so I get most of the performance I can.

also taking the hardrive out everytime I want to tranfer files between computers is insane
I only use this method when I have more data to transfer than what my flashdrive can hold.
I had over 12 gigs of data to transfer (not including VMs) and its rather time consuming and a hassle to transfer it over bit by bit especially using an 8 gig flashdrive.
not to mention I make vm hdd files that are atleast 20gigs. theres no way to transfer a 20 gig file over a 8 gig flashdrive.

I don't have a crossover cable and my my 32 flash drive has an OS installed on it. and my new laptop doesn't support USB booting. so I took the hard drive out of my own and connected it to her laptop. not her hard drive to mine. if anything trying to do it that way is what's causing my hard drive to fail at random times today. but I just got a cd that will allow me to boot from my flash drive finally.

[HunterSteele]

my 32 flash drive has an OS installed on it
And you didn't even have 12 GB left over? This must be the Rosie O'Donnell Linux Distro.

theres no way to transfer a 20 gig file over a 8 gig flashdrive.
Yes, there is. WinRAR can break the 20 gig file in 8 gig pieces, which you can transfer individually. WinRAR can then join them back together after.

I don't have a crossover cable
You can also do it over your LAN. Although if you bought a USB enclosure, you should've bought a crossover cable while you were at it.

my new laptop doesn't support USB booting.
How can it not? Pretty much every computer made since the early 2000s can boot from a USB port.

[Silicate Wielder]

not mine my BIOS is ancient it has an option for it but when I try it it just boots me into my normal OS, thats why I need a boot disk that has USB booting enabled but when It searches for the drivers needed to boot on my system It's unable to find them, Plop just wasted a perfectly good CD.
and actually even then there were still some computers that coudn't boot from a USB
mine happens to be one of those computers.
Although, if I can find the latest BIOS version for my laptop model I could then boot from USB once that is updated.

no I actually did something that you may consider crazy.
I used a live CD and installed the OS straight to the flashdrive (manually editing the partitions on it, of course.) so my flashdrive is using a single partition that is foreign to windows. plus I still have a bit of important data I had copied over to it while my mom's laptop was still working. but now I can't access that because I can't boot into it to retrieve the files.

I did that with my flashdrive before christmas because 1. its convienient and useful if you don't have a physical computer, or more specifically a computer that can't boot from it's hardrive., and 2. it's just really cool in my opinion

And my mom could use that but she absolutely hates ubuntu's guts. although I can install a tinyXP VM that shares data with the main OS on the flashdrive. but she won't let me even touch her laptop.
Although my sister's laptop may support USB booting, I never thought of that. maybe I can recover the data I have on that and then install a VM in ubuntu. if my mom will let me install it using her laptop once I explain how I can get her laptop working untill she buys a new hardrive.

[TheMatrix]

I only use this method when I have more data to transfer than what my flashdrive can hold.
I had over 12 gigs of data to transfer (not including VMs) and its rather time consuming and a hassle to transfer it over bit by bit especially using an 8 gig flashdrive.
not to mention I make vm hdd files that are atleast 20gigs. theres no way to transfer a 20 gig file over a 8 gig flashdrive.
You can break it up, using something like:
split --bytes 500M --numeric-suffixes --suffix-length=3 myfile
and then, once you've transferred all the chunks:
cat myfile* > myoriginalfile
For *nix, anyways.

And my mom could use that but she absolutely hates ubuntu's guts.
Then install anything else! Ubuntu isn't the only distribution, and you should reconsider the latest version because it spies on you (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/07/stallman_on_ubuntu_spyware/).

but she won't let me even touch her laptop.
Truth to be told, I don't blame her.

[Silicate Wielder]

I should've rephrased that, she absolutely hates linux's guts. and you can't install windows to a flashdrive without modification which I'm not going to get into right now, however I am interested in installing windows xp to my flashdrive since it holds about as much data as my laptop does. my hardrive is already going bad in my new laptop, well figures its 8 years old anyways.

[Archimedes]

I remembered one more problem. Maybe old laptop's motherboard just don't support HDD with so big capacity, so there's no way out, but to plug mother's HDD to the new laptop. It happened for me when I plugged 120 GB HDD with ATA interface to old laptop and it was not shown even in BIOS but when I set jumper to limit it's capacity to 32 GB, it worked.