Can I put an Ultra ATA hard drive in a laptop that used a SATA hard drive. The reason I want to do this is because a friend's laptop won't boot , not even in safe mode,( imo the hard drive is nackered) and of course there was no backup done.The files are needed. Now of course you'll say why not use Acronis to transfer the files to an external HDD but the problem there is that none of my friends laptops USB ports are working( haven't checked this but I'm assured it is true), so there is now way to connect an ex. HDD to it. What I'm thinkin of doin is putting the HDD into an old laptop of mine and using Acronis to transfer the files to CD or an external hdd.

What ye think? I'm inexperieced with laptops so please be gentle if this is a stupid post.

It is possible that you might be able to connect an ATA HDD to the buss where the CD/ DVD drive is connected. Whether that is SATA or PATA is anybody's guess.

Although, if the Laptop's HDD is broken, I'm not exactly sure what you think you're going to accomplish by doing so. If it's dead, it's dead, and that would require the drive to be dealt with data recovery methods. Very expensive.

Plan "B" involves running a cable to a desktop from the laptop, and offloading the data that way.

However, dead is dead, be forewarned