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Laptop hard disk not spinning or recognized by bios

i have a laptop hard disk that isn't spinning and isn't recognized by computers, i have a converter cable to convert laptop ide disks into standard ide disks which usually works but the laptop hard disk just looks likt there is no power, even when i try it in another laptop...

any ideas?

slartibartfarst

Are you sure the cable is fitted properly? You need to line up the red stripe on the ide ribbon cable with pin 1 on the drive. There should be a diagram somewhere on the drive to indicate which is pin 1. Also, you will need to connect the power plug on the convertor cable to a power outlet fom the PCs power supply, line up the red and black leads when you do this. When everything is as it should be, power the system up. Good luck

slartibartfarst

From what you are saying though, it could be that the hard drive is dead. You have 3 options here:
1 Throw it away
2 Find a working, IDENTICAL laptop drive and borrow the PCB with the drive electronics and put it in the broken one until you can salvage the data.
3 Send the broken drive away to a data recovery agency (Very expensive). A seach in Google will find you a local one.

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MB_Jacobson

Actually, I'd guess that that is the problem. Generally, laptop drives are left with no jumpers on them, which makes it a master; which is typical for a laptop. (usually only one hard drive) However, when you hook it up to a PC, i'd guess you already have a master. Check the diagrams on the drive, it should tell you how to make it a slave or CS.
The drive pins should look something like this:

................................. ..
................................. ..

(note I didn't count out the pins)

The 4 pins on the far right are the ones you set the master/slave/cs with.