Laptop boot from remote HDD when display fails.

[Lew TL]

Hello everyone,

My Dell laptop monitor failed, and I have been using a desktop monitor connecting to this Dell laptop via serial port for display. However even the serial port display output failed, I can't extend the laptop display to anything else and fixing the laptop screen costs a bomb.

While trying to backup the information in the HDD, I need to first be able to view them...

The laptop HDD is working fine, so I was wondering if I could take out the laptop HDD and make it into a portable HDD, then boot from this HDD using other computer, then copy the files out.

I heard that Windows 7 is pretty choosy on the machines when one tries to boot from external HDD. I wonder if anyone has any better ideas for me to backup my stuff?

Thanks.

Regards,
TL

 

[USAFRet]

If you have another PC, you don't need to boot from the laptop drive.

Connect it either internally via a SATA cable, or externally via a USB dock or cable.
Access and copy the files as needed.

 

[hang-the-9]

Two things you need to learn here. The connection to the monitor is not a serial port, it's a VGA port. They look a bit the same but a serial port has two rows of pins, the VGA port has three.

The other is that you don't need to actually boot off the old drive to copy the data out. Just plug it into a working computer and get the files from the drive just like any other external drive. You can't boot Windows off an external drive without a lot of extra work. Just plug your old drive into an external drive enclosure, hook that up to a computer, it will assign it a drive letter, go in and get your files out.

You may need to take ownership of the files but they should all be there. You'll find your files in *:\Users\AccountName where * is whatever drive letter your computer assigned to the external drive. Usually would be E unless you have multiple other hard drives already installed.