Hard drive

[Kymberli]

I would like to remove the hard drive from my old (crashed) computer and transfer the data on it to a external hard drive. Is there a case that I should put the hard drive in? If so what is it called and where do I buy it? How do I transfer the data once I do that? I am very ignorant about computer stuff but I know I can pull out the hard drive.

 

[T_T]

A desktop hard drive is 3.5"; the external hard drives are 2.5" and are simply laptop hard drives in plastic enclosures. That said, you can't connect a 3.5" HDD to the SATA-to-USB adapter (assuming your HDD is SATA, of course) used on the 2.5" HDDs. However, all is not lost; there is still a way to recover some of your data.

First, you must verify that the HDD in question is still good, meaning that its partitions haven't been comprimised. If the HDD can't be detected by the BIOS, there's no point in reading further.

If using IDE (flat, wide, ribbon-looking cable), you can put the HDD on the Slave connector, but you must have working HDD with an operating system already installed connected to Master. Note, to do this, you must shut down the computer.

If using SATA (narrow, about an inch wide), connect the the questionable HDD to any SATA port other than SATA1. You must have a good HDD with an OS installed connected to SATA1. Alternatively, if the computer's BIOS allows it, you might be able to specify which HDD to boot from first.

A third possibilty, in the even you're using IDE and SATA on one motherboard, you'd have to change the boot priority from IDE to SATA or vice versa, depending on which drive is bad.

Once you've got your HDDs set up correctly, simply transfer the files you want from the bad HDD to the good HDD. This can be done by going to My Computer (XP and older) or Computer (Vista and 7), and double clicking on the HDD that isn't labeled "(C".

Note, due to some of the new security features in Vista and 7, you might not be able to acces some of your files while the HDD is not the primary disk. Furthermore, you will only be able to transfer files, and not programs. For example, you can transfer any Word document you created, but you won't be able to transfer the Office program that created the Word document.