So I have this hard drive...

[heidi]

The one gareway removed from my old, defective computer. And I am sure there must be a way to retrieve everything on it (I backed up a lot, but not my archive of yms or my outlook email) but I don't know how.

Do any of you?

Comments

[tropes.livejournal.com]

Hmmm.I have two hard drives in my big desktop computer. I'm sure there's a way to connect yours to your desktop in an information-sharing sort of way. Will ponder this.

[tromboneborges.livejournal.com]

Is the hard drive itself defective? Or is it fine and just the rest of the computer is defective?

[heidi8.livejournal.com]

They said it was noisy, but they didn't say anything else was wrong with it.

[tromboneborges.livejournal.com]

Then, as per muffinbutt above, you should be able to just put Old Harddrive into Spare Slot in New Computer (provided you have a spare slot for it) and tell the computer to mount it as a new drive.

Details are dependent on: the kind of hard drive (IDE vs. SCSI vs. other stuff, although if it was internal it's likely to be one of those two), the kind of new computer (Mac vs. PC, also, laptop vs. desktop) and what else is inside new computer already, but it should be totally doable.

[kmai.livejournal.com]

if you dont have an extra slot in your computer to stick in the harddrive, try getting a firewire or usb2.0 enclosure for it. www.pricewatch.com is a good place to look for one. if you are going from a pc -> mac -> linux -> something else, sometimes there are encoding problems, then again, sometimes there aren't.

[nostrademons.livejournal.com]

For desktops at least, the procedure's usually pretty simple. I remember helping my friend out with this, and IIRC it went:

1. Open case
2. Connect little ribbon-cable connector to old hard drive.
3. Screw old hard drive in
4. Close case
5. Turn on computer.

That's assuming it's the same OS (Mac vs. PC vs. Linux), and there may be some other constraints too. Laptops may be more difficult, as you usually can't open the case up, and they don't have space for a second hard drive anyway. Find a spare desktop, a friend with one, or maybe you can buy an adapter?

[tromboneborges.livejournal.com]

As always with computers, my experience has been that that is how it goes, except for when things are slightly different and it doesn't.

For instance, I installed a second hard drive into my desktop (not even an old one; a new, blank one) and discovered that I needed to move things around on the IDE cables so that the second hard drive wasn't a slave of the CD drive (which, uh, doesn't work).

And that's assuming it's using IDE drives, which is a really good guess for most desktops, but sometimes you come across something weird... I was just info-gathering as much as possible beforehand, although I suspect that your five-step plan will work just fine...