Howdy all,
New member, first post and boy do I need some help...
There's the long and the short version of how I got to where I am but suffice it to say that while replacing the screen cable on an Asus Q501LA, (and not disconnecting the battery) I managed to touch two of the wrong things and shorted out a little something just north of the cable connection point. The result was a laptop that wouldn't do anything useful.
Being the brilliant technician that I am, I bought an identical ASUS (with a minor-cracked screen & no tough screen capability) off of EBAY with the intent of taking the hard drive out of the computer I zorched and plop it into the new-to-me one and after swapping over my good screen and improved RAM, I be good as new.
By this time all of you that are smart about this stuff realize two things about me: I'll try to fix just about anything AND I have no idea what I'm doing with this computer.
I'm drafting this note to you from the #2 unit with its original hard drive and screen and RAM from #1 unit. I"m good there.
I've tried hooking #1 hard drive to my APRICORN SATA wire and plugging into a USB port. It tries to read, stays seemingly busy for 10-15 minutes and finally says ERROR.
Fortunately, I think, I have a 1 Tb Toshiba external drive that I think has an image of the #1 unit, but a few months old. I had put it in safe keeping to preserve photos, music, etc and did not keep up to date. But at least I have it.
HERE'S MY THOUGHT AND QUESTION (finally): After dinking around and doing a lot of reading I'm thinking my best bet is to create a new partition on the new #2 hard drive, then restore the image of #1 hard drive to this partition. From what I've read that should give me basically a second operating system I could access by booting up that partition (D:\)?
Does this make sense? Will it work? Is there an easier way to do this? How could I go about either getting to the data on the original hard drive, or better, install it to the new unit?
I'm pretty wide open to anything that a guy with 10 thumbs and no computer education (other than the Ag Eco class where we wrote if/then statements on yellow pads with #2 pencils, handed them to the class TA who punched our 'coding' onto cards and fed them into the thing that took up most of the room).
In other words, it's gotta be pretty straight forward and cheap. If I had money for super-dooper software and pricey peripherals I would have taken the whole thing to a shop.
I"m looking forward to hearing how many ways y'all can call me a bonehead without using the same words as the last guy (or gal).
So here you go. Have at me!