I brought the unit with me out to the bar on Friday evening. As I had hoped, I ran into Walt before he had a chance to leave. He looked at the hard drive for about 30 seconds and realized that the connector which had been giving everyone so much trouble was actually just an adapter attachment that came off! Underneath that was simply a standard 42-pin connector which would work with the unit at Radio Shack. Progress could now be made.
Saturday I went to Radio Shack, went to the wall where the adapter was, and...it wasn't there. I started to have heart palpitations when I realized that - in just a couple of days - the store had been thoroughly rearranged. A salesman came over to assist, but I tried to drop several hints that I wanted to be helped by the same guy who helped me twice before. When this sales guy couldn't find what I was looking for, he finally called over the other one. He grabbed it, made sure it was what I needed, then rang it up and sent me on my way.
Sunday afternoon I went to Walt's. I brought the laptop hard drive in its new case assembly, and I brought an external hard drive which I had bought at Fry's within the last year. The idea was simply to transfer everything from the laptop hard drive to one of Walt's computers, then transfer the data out to my external hard drive. Simple, unless the laptop hard drive was in some way corrupted or otherwise broken.
Since I can't (and don't want to) remember everything that happened next, I'll condense the action. We proceeded to plug in the laptop and external hard drives to each of Walt's three computers, only to wait for long stretches of time with nothing happening - or worse, with things happening that we couldn't explain. Finally, by process of elimination, we came to the conclusion that the external hard drive was in some way corrupted, and this was causing most/all our problems. (I think I only backed up iTunes songs on the external hard drive, so I have no idea why it should have a problem.) After hours of being there, I ended up taking my laptop hard drive home and plugging it in to my other laptop, at which point it commenced to work. If I had only known which unit to pull out of the laptop, and that the hard drive itself had a removable adapter, and that the part I needed was at Radio Shack, and that all I had to do was plug it into my other computer, I would've saved myself lots of time, energy and gas. Ugh.
At this point, I haven't been able to get everything from my old computer. But assuming that it might work without problems, I now have a 70gig hard drive attached to my laptop. I'm just hoping it'll be worth all the trouble...
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