Modding an old laptop.

[Ddm5]

Right, so I have this not soo old laptop I bought off my brother, mostly bought it for the ram for my other laptop and the HDD, this half dead laptop is an old ASUS laptop that had 3Gb ram, 320Gb or 250Gb HDD, Dual core, Win7. I've run into a big problem to be quite honest, the problem is to do with the actual HDD, the HDD seems alive as I've test the same laptop with my other laptops HDD, but the problem I think lies within the actual HDD port itself inside the laptop, it isn't directly linked to the MB as it has a little stand off and I think it's broken as whenever I try and boot into window it says it can't find the HDD or the proper boot media even when a fresh Win7 disk is placed within the DVD tray, any ideas?, I was planning on putting the entire laptop without it's housing into some qwerky like a box with a flip up screen, etc.

[FrontGeek18]

Have you looked in bios? check boot priority? Also you could propably solder the HDD connector? also Turn it into a home server? :)

[threee6]

u can ususaly buy the adapters on ebay for very little, worth a go i'd say :)

[Sfobrien52]

What do you mean by "seems alive as I've test the same laptop with my other laptops HDD"? did you put a new hdd in the old laptop? or vice versa?

because if the new hard drive is working in the old, then the hdd connector probably isnt the problem. You can pull the old drive and put it in your new laptop (or anything else you've got around) and see if it works.

If it works, probably the connector.

 

Work your way up the chain and find where the weak link is