Is a Laptop hard drive readable from a Windows 7 desktop?

I have a windows 8 laptop that won't boot from either the Hard Drive or Optical Drive. I have taken the Hard drive out and connected it to my desktop that runs Windows 7. I have tried with an USB external adapter and connected directly to the motherboard with SATA and power cables. Neither way has produced a readable drive that I can see any files on.

I have tried to search this problem and cannot find any useable information on either Google or Bing. I need to know if there is an issue with reading Windows 8 formated hard drives in a windows 7 enviroment or is there something wrong with this hard drive?

Thank you

Hello theeye, and welcome to Eight Forums

Sounds like there's something wrong with the HDD. Possibly a dead hard drive.

When it's connected to your Windows 7 PC, open Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) to see if it's listed, and post a screenshot showing it in Disk Management if it is.
What brand is the hard drive? You might also download a drive testing program from the manufacturer's site to test the drive with to see if it fails. If it fails, then it's a dead or dying a driving.

Hope this helps for now,
Shawn

Yeh, if you connected it via the SATA connection directly to the mobo, and it didn't immediately work -- it's either dead or you have a drive letter conflict which I run into quite often on my 7 box but this is usually due to network drives being mapped. If the drive does show up but has no drive letter, try changing/assigning a new one by right clicking and selecting the similarly named option.

Drive Letter - Add, Change, or Remove in Windows 7 - Windows 7 Help Forums

I concur, possible dead drive.

If you are not sure, you can download Hiren's Boot CD from the link below. Burn it and boot to it. Run "Mini XP" and connect the drive - If it does not detect and add a drive letter, you can use the Partition Wizard in there to check it.

Sometimes, if a Drive has been formatted for a Linux OS, it will not show a drive letter and the Disk Manager will show a drive which is not the full capacity of the drive. This happened to my Flash Drive, after I had moved a Chromium Linux onto it with an ISO to USB formatter.

Maybe not related at all but I know the reverse scenario Windows 7 drive ==> 8 computer with UEFI bios is a real pain.

Readable yes, but getting it to boot is a whole different issue.