hi i got some help off here a few days ago. Iv got a new laptop (toshiba portege 3110) with no os. Someone said that i need to connect the hd to my desktop. I have a cable to do this but when i turn my deskyop on it syas checking ide devices....and nothing happens. Can anyone tell me what to do? someone mentioned jumpering it as a slave?!? If so how?

Next to where you plug in the IDE data cable into the drive, there are some other pins. Either you need to look on the label of the drive, or go to the manufacturers web site to see how to jumper it to "slave". You also need to make sure the HD in your desktop is jumpered to master if it is on the same cable. If is no jumper shunt "clip" on the laptop drive, you will have to get (buy) some. Radio Shack?? Local clone computer store? Rule #1 Good computers don't go down. Rule #2 There is no such thing as a good computer.

cheers mate ill have a look and see where i get too.

Be very careful attaching 2.25" drives to desktops - there's a power connector in there somewhere which the desktop's drive connectors don't have the facility for. Back to your original 'problem', I guess your laptop has a CD drive, or at least a floppy drive - what's wrong with just installing your OS using disks - using a desktop is pointless unless you're planning to clone the drives which won't work anyway because of hardware differences. What exactly are you trying to do? "I know that I'm mad - I've always been mad..."

sorry iv not been on the net since my last post. Thanks for the help. The laptop is a old one that does not have a cd rom drive or a floppy drive. It has a external floppy drive and a external cd rom drive but the drivers for the cd rom are not on the laptop. Therefore i need to install windows some other way. I was told that the best way is to attach the laptop harddrive to my desktop hd and copy w2k across that way.

Ricky.... I had an older laptop without a working CD-rom drive, nor an floppy drive and a weak battery. I bought one of those $7 laptop connectors, removed the case and hooked the little laptop hard drive on to the big computer. Then, began loading onto the little hard drive using the big computer CD-rom and etc. the Win98 operating system, and all the intended software, plus the laptop drivers. I did not activate ANY of the laptop drivers for the LCD or any other BIOS information. Held this off until the hard drive was reinstalled back into laptop. I later installed FASTLYNX to communicate back and forth to big computer any forgotten software. With a cable, it can use the big CD-rom and floppy to communicate direct to these drives. Wm.

How did you specify NOT to activate the laptop drivers for the LCD and Bios? This is the part that is baffling me. At what stage? I'm trying to perform something similar with WinXP on 2 laptops w/out CD Drives. An help would be appreciated. thx