Topic: best way to get data off of old PC hard drive

[cleantone]

So I am trashing my old PC. This is pretty old. No USB, no FW. I am giving my buddy the RAM tonight. The hard drive is a 40gig 7200rpm drive so that is worth keeping. I don't want to burn CD's and probably cannot network the computer to another one. If I pop the drive into an enclosure would I be able to mount it on a newer PC and get any old music off of it? I'm not sure if the master bootable drive will work that way in an enclosure. Any better ideas?

[J]

If you got a new computer, you have a couple of options for your old HD (that I can think of, anyway)

Get an enclosure, and hook it up to your new computer via USB/ Firewire/ whateva...  Another option would be to set the old hard drive to run as a slave, crack the case of your new computer, and install it internally.

Either way, it shouldn't be a problem at all to pull the data off of the old drive.

j

[cleantone]

Okay. I should have said that I have been running Mac (non intel) exclusivly for years now. I have two now and never boot the PC. I have access to a Windows machine running XP with USB2 and FW. I alos have a bunch of external drives already. I just do not know if I put this old PC formatted drive into an enclosure if it will mount like a normal external drive letting me search around and find any files I may want to keep before reformatting the drive. I definitly don't want to slave it to another drive. Or at least that would be my least prefered option.

[bluegrass_brad]

When I trashed my old PC (running windows 98) that I had kept around for transferring DATS (I finally finished all the DATS), I just pulled out the drive, popped it into an external case and plugged it into my mac. It showed right up.  I just deleted all the windows OS file stuff to free up room.  I was easily able to access all the WAV files and text documents I had made containing source info on the Mac. I have been slowly tracking and transferring all the stuff on it and have had no problems either reading or writing to it.

[TNJazz]

It should be fine if it's FAT16 or FAT32.  If the drive is formatted NTFS though, you may not see all of the contents.  You'll still be able to see it and some folders may show up, but more than likely not everything will and of course the drive won't be writable.

Good luck!

[Church-Audio]

So I am trashing my old PC. This is pretty old. No USB, no FW. I am giving my buddy the RAM tonight. The hard drive is a 40gig 7200rpm drive so that is worth keeping. I don't want to burn CD's and probably cannot network the computer to another one. If I pop the drive into an enclosure would I be able to mount it on a newer PC and get any old music off of it? I'm not sure if the master bootable drive will work that way in an enclosure. Any better ideas?

I dont think we want to hear about you giving your buddy "the ram" 

[Church-Audio]

So I am trashing my old PC. This is pretty old. No USB, no FW. I am giving my buddy the RAM tonight. The hard drive is a 40gig 7200rpm drive so that is worth keeping. I don't want to burn CD's and probably cannot network the computer to another one. If I pop the drive into an enclosure would I be able to mount it on a newer PC and get any old music off of it? I'm not sure if the master bootable drive will work that way in an enclosure. Any better ideas?

Best way to get the old data off is to connect it to your secondary IDE port on your computer and boot up windows it should see the drive you want to change your bios settings to boot from your primary ide. That should do it.. If not you may need to get a usb drive enclosure They are cheap and its always a good idea when your computer is brand new to make backups all the time because new hardware will fail if it does fail in the first 30 days or so.
Or make a boot disk with fdisk.exe but if you dont know what your doing I would just use the USB box method.

Chris

[Jhurlbs81]

Any way to transfer info through a serial cable?  I'm in a similar boat, but I don't want to take out the HD.

[flipp]

Any way to transfer info through a serial cable?  I'm in a similar boat, but I don't want to take out the HD.

There is a way to transfer using parallel or crossover cables using Direct Cable Connection in Windows versions through at least W2k, don't know about XP or Vista as I don't have either. Check Windows Help files for more info. Or open Networking in the Control Panel to see if it's installed on your comp and info for how to install it if it isn't already. One word of warning though, it's painfully slow, USB 1 is fast in comparison.

[gratefulphish]

Any way to transfer info through a serial cable?  I'm in a similar boat, but I don't want to take out the HD.

There are a number of options, from parallel to parallel, I believe serial to serial, and USB to USB, without removing the drive.  The USB will be much faster than either of the others.  Alternatively, you can always pull the drive, install it in the other machine, move what you want, and then put it back.  It is very easy. Even I have learned how to do this. 

[live2496]

Here's a USB cable that you could use to get your data from one system to the other.
http://www.usbgeek.com/prod_detail.php?prod_id=0220

You would have to disconnect your IDE connection on the source pc and connect the USB adapter to the destination computer.

Make sure that the source computer drive has power and has spun up and is ready. Then connect the USB into the destination computer.

Technically, you don't have to remove the drive for this solution (just the cable). 
I'm not sure if the formatting of the drive will matter over USB. Probably it could be anything  NTFS/FAT/FAT32.