Any laptop/hardware gurus here?

[Elvis]

I'm trying to swap hard drives between a Toshiba 6100 and a Compaq Presario 2590US.

The drives are physically identical. There's one jumper setting different between the two. But when I put the drive that came from the Toshiba into the Compaq I get boot errors and it throws me into setup.

I dunno what the right settings should be, even though the Compaq says "auto-detect" and it appears to be reading and displaying file names from the old drive before failing.

The reason I'm trying to do this is that the power supply on the Toshiba died last night and I need to get some important stuff off of it b4 I send it out to be repaired.

[DaveSmed]

What errors are you getting? Some of the older Compaqs stored a part of thier BIOS on the harddrive.

[bob2231]

Originally Posted by Elvis

I'm trying to swap hard drives between a Toshiba 6100 and a Compaq Presario 2590US.

The drives are physically identical. There's one jumper setting different between the two. But when I put the drive that came from the Toshiba into the Compaq I get boot errors and it throws me into setup.

I dunno what the right settings should be, even though the Compaq says "auto-detect" and it appears to be reading and displaying file names from the old drive before failing.

The reason I'm trying to do this is that the power supply on the Toshiba died last night and I need to get some important stuff off of it b4 I send it out to be repaired.

A couple questions Elvis. First, are you adding the drive from the dead machine in addition to an existing drive in the working machine ? If so, you have to set the master\slave jumpers for both drives.
Second, are both drives the same brand ? Sometimes the overlays aren't compatable.

[the Sandman]

You can't just swap drives like that unless it's into two identical laptops. The software drivers from the Toshiba laptop are not correct for the hardware in the Compaq laptop and this is being detected during booting. What you need to do is find an external laptop hard drive reader (with cable and PCMCIA card) to connect to Compaq laptop via the PCMCIA card slot to copy the contents of the Toshiba's hard drive to the hard drive on the Compaq.

[elwesso]

Yes.... Its not as easy as desktop drives (where you just need the correct interface).....

[Elvis]

Thanks for the replies, everyone. I just got the same answers on another forum. I could hook it up as a slave, but not the master because of OS differences, BIOS differences, and a myriad of other differences.

I just thought that because it was obviously "trying" to read the old drive and was partially succeeding that there might be something easy I could do. The problem has to do with some software that the Compaq is encountering on the old Toshiba drive that's causing it to fail.

If it were configured as a slave drive, and not the boot drive, this would probably work. I'm going to the repair shop in a few minutes. It's not the end of the world. Just a postponement.

Thanks again.