Dell as external drive?

[Mojo67821]

This is a weird question, so please bear with me. I'm trying to help a friend who just had a major crash.

I had experience recently with using a Powerbook, which would not load OSX, as an external drive on a MacPro, for the purpose of saving files off of the Powerbook.

We just hooked it up with a firewire cable and had to hold a button combination down in order to get the MacPro to recognize it as a drive. Then we just dragged and dropped the files.

My question is, is there any way to do this with a Dell laptop? I have a friend whose laptop bricked recently (blue screen of death) and she also has an Imac, so i was wondering if there's any way to use it as an external drive to save her files. We would only need to copy from the hard drive, so format differences shouldn't be an issue.

If not, is a place like CompUSA her only hope? Sorry if this is in the wrong forum, I wasn't really sure where to place it. Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[MikeTheC]

Unfortunately, no. "Target Disk Mode" is, AFAIK, an Apple-only feature.

Yet another reason to own a Mac, right?

Take the PC to a local authorized service center, have 'em do what they need to do to back up the data, and then go from there.

Believe me, you don't want to get into pulling a laptop apart. Some are easier than others, but it's also pretty easy to screw 'em up. Always transfer that liability onto the broad shoulders of someone who has insurance!

 

[pjarvi]

Dell laptops are extremely easy to remove hard drives from. Typically it's just 1 screw holding the hard drive carrier, that slides out, and then there are just 4 screws that hold the hard drive in the carrier. Once you get the hard drive out, pull off the pin adapter carefully, and plug the drive into a usb external hard drive enclosure. You can then hook the drive up externally to get the data off.

The cost of a USB enclosure is $15-$20 versus $50 to over $100 for paying a store to do the backup for you.