Gaining access to the hard drive after zorching the mother board

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!

We learn by trying stuff.  Sometimes we fix it, sometimes we zorch it - but still we learn.

If the drive isn't recognized with the Apricorn SATA device, then it's likely that it's dead/dying.

Run the Seagate Seatools for Windows on the attached drive (run the long/extended tes) to verify this.

Yes, you can put the image on a second partition and you'll have a second copy of the OS to work with.
The difficult lies in making it boot and making it give you the options for which one to boot to.

But, if all you want is the data, W10 has the ability to mount ISO files.  So, if the image is an ISO (or one of the other files that W10 recognizes) you can just open it in Windows Explorer (File Explorer in W10, but I'm stubborn and refuse to use the new name :0).  If it's not an ISO (or other file that W10 recognizes), then find a freeware image mounter for the file type that you have.

Or, you can put the image on the second partition and not worry about booting it.  Then you can boot the first partition and copy over the files from the second partition.

Thanks for the rapid response usasma!

I"ll get the Seagate tool you recommended and try it.  Not sure what to do with it as this computer never recognizes it in as far as assigning it a drive letter.

Displaying my ignorance, I don't know what an ISO file is but I'll look it up.  But data isn't my biggest problem unfortunately.  I bought the first one as a display unit from BestBuy.  It came loaded with MS Office but no disks (and I really don't want to buy the suite if don't absolutely have to).  There also are two XP era programs, one a construction project estimating / take-off and the other a GPS Suite.  Both were downloads and I"ve not upgraded so no help from them.

I'm glad to hear about the partition idea though.  From everything I've been able to read that seemed to be pretty straight forward.  I didn't understand that it could be difficult to get Windows to boot from a different partition.  That's going to take some more homework.  

Again, many thanks usasma!

You can try the bootable version of SeaTools - but in general, if the system doesn't recognize the drive enough to give it a drive letter, then it's likely to be dead.
To verify you can try it on several systems.

As for the boot stuff, check out this tool:  https://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/
The non-commercial version is free for personal use.