IDE to SATa

[William_White]

This week the power supply on my old pc that I used as a storage server and to play old games, that I no longer have the CD for, went out. It has an IDE (I think, it most definatly is not a sata drive) HDD. Assuming the power supply did not take the drive with it,how can I go about getting the information off the old drive. Money is tight and I highly doubt I will use this again so I don't want to pay much, also if I use a program like DD (my primary computer is running Linux) to transfer it to another disk would all the programs and games be playable without having to find a cd key as well as it be a bootable drive.

 

[Pinhedd]

This week the power supply on my old pc that I used as a storage server and to play old games, that I no longer have the CD for, went out. It has an IDE (I think, it most definatly is not a sata drive) HDD. Assuming the power supply did not take the drive with it,how can I go about getting the information off the old drive. Money is tight and I highly doubt I will use this again so I don't want to pay much, also if I use a program like DD (my primary computer is running Linux) to transfer it to another disk would all the programs and games be playable without having to find a cd key as well as it be a bootable drive.

PATA <-> SATA is a royal pain in the ass. There are converters but they usually suck and don't work properly. Most Windows games store their CD keys / authorization information in the system registry which means that if you clone it completely and boot from the OS that's on the drive you most likely will not have any problems playing the games. If you simply copy the game data, you will have to reinstall most of them.

 

[William_White]

Best answer selected by William_White.