How do I Transfer my Data from my dead laptops Internal HD to my new laptop?

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Apr 15, 2018
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So my old laptop's charger stopped working and the battery still has a 50-60 percent charge but I doubt it'll be enough for me to cut/copy paste stuff onto my external drive (it's 1TB). I have around 500GB worth of data, if not more.
I'm talking about transfer data like documents, images, videos etc not OS. I'll install new OS on my new laptop. I just need to retrieve my files.

How can I transfer my files from my almost-dead laptops HDD to new laptop?
 
Solution
Unless your new laptop has a second slot for another drive or something along those lines no. You would need a dock or have a desktop and hook up the HDD through there. If you have no way to charge the laptop the only way would be to take the HDD out.
Jun 14, 2018
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You could get a docking bay, seems like a waste.

A better solution, in my opinion, would be to get a 2.5 External HDD case and take your old laptop HDD and put it in that. So then after you move all the files you need over, just format it and you got another external drive.
 
Jun 14, 2018
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Unless your new laptop has a second slot for another drive or something along those lines no. You would need a dock or have a desktop and hook up the HDD through there. If you have no way to charge the laptop the only way would be to take the HDD out.
 
Solution

Michael Albert

Estimable
Feb 11, 2014
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I also suggest booting from the HDD when connecting it to the new laptop so the user takes all the privileges of the OS, then copying everything to an external HDD or somewhere else, then boot in the new laptop's OS, format the old HDD after the backup and finally use it as a backup drive itself.
 

USAFRet

Illustrious
Moderator


Booting the "new" laptop from the old laptops hard drive?
Why do you suppose that would actually work? Because it probably won't.

A 2.5" external enclosure, or a docking bay is what is needed here. Connect the drive from the old system as a secondary drive, and copy shat is needed.
This may involve taking ownership of that data, but it will work.
 

Michael Albert

Estimable
Feb 11, 2014
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0
4,510


I tried it before and it works well, maybe because i'm mostly a Linux user, i assume you are addressing Windows/other OS? Also if you try to use a tool such as Clonezilla to clone a HDD to another one, and boot the cloned HDD from another laptop, it works, maybe i should have clarified that this worked for me on Linux, apologies.

 

USAFRet

Illustrious
Moderator


Linux, sure.
Windows is a different animal. Moving a drive, or a clone of a drive, between systems often does not work.

Basically, 3 outcomes:
1. It boots up just fine
2. It fails completely
3. It boots up, but you have weeks of little issues cropping up.

I've seen all 3.
 
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