Retrieving Data from Old Hard Drives

Railroad

Railroad

Routinely Derailed
I have a collection of old hard drives not discarded because I thought someday I would try to retrieve what's on them. It's an assortment of IDE and SATA drives, and I'm interested in looking at ways to set each of them up as a USB external hard drive without spending much money. Any ideas?
 
GURPS

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
I have 2 different ones, a few yrs old .. that work great.


[side note, mine would not show more than 2Tb of data across the USB connection ...]

I was used the adapter to copy data before I actually installed the new Hard Drive in my PC ...
 
C

czygvtwkr

Guest
I have one of those, it works about half of the time. It worked enough to get the data off my old drives and that is all that mattered. I even got data off the drive of my first computer, it was a 130 MB (yes MB not GB) drive.

Then I took a sledge hammer to them.
 
Railroad

Railroad

Routinely Derailed
COOL! Great answers all! Thanks. I think I'll be placing an Amazon order in the very near future.
 
Railroad

Railroad

Routinely Derailed
Just an Update

Just an update: The SATA/IDE to USB adapter works great. When I ordered the adapter, I got a case for making a laptop hard drive into a USB external hard drive too. That also works great. Thanks very much for the advice, folks.

The only issues I encountered were associated with drive formatting. I had two "bare" drives which the computers just wouldn't see. Looks like the solution is to install a bare drive in a computer and boot from CD ROM, and load an OS (which formats and partitions the drive).

In olden days we could use DOS commands to make a computer recognize and format the drive (format x:/s being the last thing done). I don't remember what else had to be done to get the computer to recognize the drive in the first place, but it doesn't matter, because booting from CD works fine. I can use an OpenSuse DVD for that purpose.
 
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