External hard disk on dell laptop?

Question

my frnd have dell latitude C600 or may be C500 laptop. his laptop HDD is now damaged. i suugest it to use external 80 gb hard disk. plz tell me whether that laptop can be use by using external HDD. it is Pentium 3.

Answer 1

why not just replace the damaged hard drive. You can pick up a 2.5" internal hard drive for cheap at your local store (futureshop, computer avenue, etc.). Given that the laptop is a Pentium 3, you won't be able to boot from an external usb hard drive because the chipsets in those laptops didn't support booting from a usb device. Also your friend has, unless he got a PCMCIA usb 2.0 card, is limited to usb 1 or 1.1, which is very slow.

Could you be more specific on the damage? Did windows crash or did the hard drive fall or what?

you can get a linux live cd and see if you can salvage any information that was stored on the hard drive before it was "damaged". Depending on how severe the damage is you may be able to reformat and reinstall Windows or whatever os your friend had before.

in short: get a new internal hard drive.