Hallo!

 U> the laptop hardrive was bundled in quite a nice little package that was 
 U> obviously a tray for the hard drvie to slide into the laptop. I took it off

 U> and now I'm in

:-)))

 U> drive one side < on the hard drive >  has like 2 more rows of pins < 4 pins
 U> this is most obvioulsy for the power to the hard drive.

No. As I already noted, the power supply is in the 44 pins, so if you have a 44
pin notebook IDE cable going from the mainboard to the hard drive, you already
have the power supply.

The additional 4 pins you are speaking of are for jumpering master/slave and
cable select. In those notebook drives I have seen so far, leaving both open is
OK for "single mode", which is what you need.

 U> fans .. I'm the one who was crazy :) Now -- cables ... I need some.

As I said, www.parts-data.de. Some person recently posted another supply, which
might be easier to access for you, but is IMO by far too expensive. I paid 7 DM
for my cable, which is about 4 US-$. (Well, there were another 15 DM shipping
costs, but this is still less expensive).

Viele Gruesse,
Tobias