What I would do is proceed with burning a copy of Fedora 23 (The one I use for my LiveCD) and only have the laptop Hard Drive connected to the desktop, and boot from the LiveCD and read it from there. I've never had a problem doing that. If it still doesn't show up, I'd wonder if there are other problems at hand.
Otherwise, those external SATA to USB adapters do work. A Docking station tends to work a lot better than the IDE/SATA to USB adapters that also require an additional power brick. I don't like those much. Then again, it's a laptop Hard Drive, so you can buy a SATA to USB 3.0 adapter. It includes the power aspect too. I haven't seen those fail as much. Really good to have regardless.
I have to disagree here. For a 2.5" drive, that you can't properly secure, a docking station is the only way to go. Do you want the drive flopping about like a wounded trout, or tucked neatly into a docking port that holds it snug*? The former allows for it to be shorted, connected improperly, or in motion while spinning up, that could result in damage, data loss, or worse.
The docking station is far more secure, does all that a cable-based adapter would do--those typically still require external power--works with multiple drive types, and is easily stabilised. (It isn't typically faster, in my experience, but it is much safer.)
The docking units can be bought on Amazon quite inexpensively, too.
Thanks, Zoria, that was pretty informative. I haven't done anything else today with this, but, see below, since I think I was a bit unclear orginally.
Nah, the primary Hard drive is still in my computer. I don't want to boot from the latptop's drive, I just wanted to plug it in, and was hoping it'd show up like a regular external drive, but I'm thinking I have to tell the computer it is there in the BIOS since it's a real HDD and not USB Plug in Play type of thing.. I have no desire to boot another Windows on my primary computer from another drive unless it is an emergency scenario. I should have been more clear initially.
The main reason I was asking about booting from it was cause I was concerned my computer might freak out if it "sees" two windows partitions, and it hasn't been set up correctly in the BIOS. I also completely forgot that you do have to manually select a drive to boot from, so there really is no problem there. It's just sitting in there connected to a SATA plug, and I haven't powered down my computer yet. I am going to clean the case again, and mess with it. It's kind of cumbersome to open my case with my current set-up lol.
What I was saying earlier still applies. Windows doe snot tend to like popping another NTFS boot drive in a system, and doing read-write to it. It might not mount for any variety of reasons, including being a SATA type that your internal controller does not support, having boot sector or filesystem layout errors, or damage; the moon not aligning with Venus, or some kind of system-specific protection.
The reason that I use Parted magic, and a USB dock, is two-fold.
First, Parted Magic will do read-write to just about every filesystem, mounting it, and it includes a suite of data recovery tools.
Second, the USB dock will bypass some BIOS things that want to read and determine boot sectors and other device information on init. If the device has issues with its partitions, or other problems, the dock will bypass many of these.
THis is because the SATA adapter on a dock is a 'dumb' adapter. it does not determine drive health, perform diagnostics, or try to configure boot values in the way that the full SATA adapter bus wants to do; so drives that have problems mounting can be mounted more readily this way. The USB/FW bus is read by Linux, and the dumb adapter converts that to SATA via its host controller.
Honestly, this is many times easier to do than trying to configure your system internally, and above all, it doesn;t risk data loss. By fiddling with your BIOS/Firmware settings and forcing the device to mount, you gamble with its safety, and I would not advise it.
Even if you do manage to safely mount it, the stress, and the time involved outweigh the cost of a USB dock (fifteen quid here, maybe twenty to twenty-five US dollars), and the time and costs to make a Parted magic boot device, which are: Either a blank DVD and half an hour to download an image and burn it; or less than five quid for an 8GB USB fen drive and about twenty minutes to download the image and use Unetbootn to make a boot drive with it.
I prefer the USB method, because the device is faster, making boot time quicker, seek time faster, and disc operations faster; plus, it works on any system with a USB controller, even if it lacks a CD/DvD drive. That said, i would make both as it is always good to havbe a disc on hand. The Parted Magic suite is something that everyone should have to hand. In particular, the utility 'Test Disk' is very helpful.
Many times, I have had SD cards throw r/w errors, that can be cleared by rewriting their primary sectors. I often need to do data copying/device cloning, which PM can do, and it also handles data recovery, disc partition set-up--including easy ways to make multi-boot systems--and disc back-ups including full disc imaging using Clonezilla.
It is assuredly a must-have utility, and although i do not like the way that the author of the distro handles its quasi-commercialisation, I do not object to giving him some money. I just won't do it purely to download the tools, as he didn't write any of them. They are all open source utilities, and he merely assembled a Linux distro that fits on a CD with all of the tools.
It is also a usable boot OS. i have in fact, installed it on a hard disc, and used it for a dedicated data recovery, cloning, and drive testing station. It comes with a TCP/IP stack, and Firefox, along with other basic programmes that can be used as a full host OS, if needed, so for an emergency boot suite, it is exceptional. You can for example, browse the web, and watch YouTube videos, whilst performing disc operations.
*I had as a typo, 'snog', which is also appropriate in a perverse sort of way.