1.8" LG owners; swapped drives? Forgot to get data off? There IS a solution.

My dummy moment of the weekend: I put in a 32gb SSD... and forgot to connect up an external drive and image the old one or even copy anything off first. Not only duh, but BIG duh. Not wanting to open the laptop back up I decided to just load XP on the new drive and figure it out somehow. (I always try to travel with an XP CD, an antivirus CD, an XP key and and a drivers/software DVD... for some reason I forgot the last two..NOT GOOD!)

I got it running, downloaded the LG Updater and let it spend forever downloading all the crap it needs over the slow-assed 1Mbit hotel connection. So all was well... but NO software... and an XP I won't attempt to activate 'cause I used a ghetto-googled key just to get the install up and running. 30 days of non-activated working is better than "illegal key, time is up, enter a valid key or shut down". Yeah there's workarounds but if you can't google for 'em you can't use the lappy to look for 'em.

So... into alternative thinking mode. I have a 60gb 5th gen iPod video... I remembered the older 'pods as having mini-ATA connectors but didn't know about the new ones. Sure enough, the 5th gens have ZIF connectors! SWEET! So I cracked open my iPod and replaced the 'Pod disk with the 80GB from my LG. I then started it up in disk mode (reboot the 'pod and hold down the center button and Play once you see the un-backlit Apple logo) and connected it via USB. Voila, there's my stuff! Or is it???

Minor problem... I saw a drive but it wasn't ANY of my stuff. What I was seeing was the recovery partition. D'OH! The iPod isn't smart enough to recognize dual partitions... and Windows ABSOLUTELY misreports the free space on the drive.. so DO NOT copy anything TO it in this mode.

What I did to get around the problem is simply delete the recovery partition, shut down the machine, and hard reboot the iPod. Worked like a champ. All my software was there, I was able to access the registry from my old XP install to extract the key (a bit of a pain in itself) as well as a few choice software keys/settings (LOTRO... unlike WOW you can't just copy it and run and I wasn't waiting 14 hours for the client to download!) It all worked like a champ! Now I'm back up and all is well (I have MSDN access so could download Office 2007... which you can find elsewhere... but for software not easily locateable the registry hacks might work.)

Bonus side benefit; I now have an 80gb iPod!

 

cool , smart thinking , are you saying your laptop dosnt use a 2.5 ide connector and a ipod one instead? that sucks a bit But least you got it all sorted , you musta been at this hotel for a long time...

 

Indeed... wasn't INTENDING to be there that long but got held over for something else and decided to go ahead and do the swap. I normally don't take parts with me but the stuff was already in the laptop bag.