If the drive has what appears to be an edge connector with 22 contacts on each side poking out the back, that is probably just an adaptor fitted onto a standard 44-pin IDE connector, and should pull off.
That was the case with the drive my colleague pulled out of an old Dell laptop. He'd got a 2.5" USB enclosure for it and was most disappointed that it didn't fit, until I realised that the edge connector just pulled off.
Addendum -just had a look inside another defunct Dell laptop, and the drive was in a caddy with a different non-standard seeming connector, but once I got it out of the caddy the connector was (again) an adapter connected to a standard 44-pin laptop IDE connector.
It is (or certainly was) a common trick. Since laptop drives are normally slid into position in some sort of a caddy, much like hot-swappable drives, pins on either the drive or host would be vulnerable to damage. Edge connectors are much more robust.
Thank you! My computer died recently so I've been looking at getting a drive enclosure so I can retrieve stuff off the HD, but not knowing how to tell the difference makes things a bit tricky.
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That was the case with the drive my colleague pulled out of an old Dell laptop. He'd got a 2.5" USB enclosure for it and was most disappointed that it didn't fit, until I realised that the edge connector just pulled off.
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