How to Read Old Hard Drive With New Computer

If you've been using PCs for a while, you likely take an sometime hard drive (or three) from previous computers sitting effectually. If you lot ever need to get at the data on an one-time bulldoze, there'southward easy way to do so without mounting the drive within your PC.

Ahhh the hassle of former hard drives. There'southward hardly a geek around, or fifty-fifty coincidental computer owner for that affair, that doesn't take a few old drives squirreled away. If you lot always demand to get the information off an one-time bulldoze—or only want to check the drive and peradventure erase information technology before disposal—you could always crack open your PC and mount the drive inside. But that'due south a lot of work to solve a temporary need. In that location are much better solutions around these days.

Find an External Dock or Adapter

RELATED: How to Turn an Sometime Hard Drive Into an External Drive

There are different styles of gadgets that permit you connect a difficult drive as an external drive. If you're looking to make a more permanent external drive out of an old difficult drive, you tin buy a full enclosure. Subsequently mounting your drive in the enclosure and buttoning things up, you've essentially got an external drive you tin connect however you want. You can observe bulldoze enclosures for as little as $10.

The trouble with an enclosure is that information technology takes almost every bit much time to mount the drive in an enclosure every bit it does to mountain the drive in your PC. If you're looking for something that lets you hands connect old drives to your PC temporarily, you tin can use a dock or a simple adapter.

On the more expensive side of things, you tin selection upwards a dock for around $xxx-forty similar this Anker USB 3.0 dock. The dazzler of a dock like this is that y'all can get out information technology connected to your PC and merely plug in an quondam hard drive whenever you need access. Some docks even let you connect two hard drives at once. If you routinely work with old drives, a dock is well worth the price. The only problem is that hardly anyone makes a dock that supports both IDE and SATA connections anymore. So, if you demand to piece of work with actually onetime IDE drives in addition to SATA drives, yous may have to pick up a 2nd dock.

If y'all only occasionally demand to hook up an old drive—or even just need to do it once—you lot're probably better off with an adapter. Historically, such adapters were on the flaky side, but improvements in both Windows and the hardware itself has yielded undecayed functionality at really reasonable prices.

The model nosotros like is the Sabrent USB 3.0 to SATA/IDE Adapter ($23). It's reliable, speedy, and, comes with its ain molex transformer and so you tin can power the drives. This is where many of the adapters yous detect out there fall short: they provide a cable, but you're expected to provide the ability via an onetime PSU or something. The Sabrent model packages both the adapter and power supply together so y'all're non left trying to effigy out how to power your drives. Best of all, this adapter supports both SATA and IDE drives.

Connect the Hard Drive

Deciding on the hardware you want is the trickiest part of this whole endeavor. Later on you get the hardware, all yous demand to do is connect the drive to it, and and then connect the hardware to the PC.

If you're using a dock, it's super piece of cake. Connect the dock to your PC just like you would connect an external drive. Drop the difficult drive into the slot and turn the dock on.

If you're using an adapter, you'll need to use the appropriate side of the adapter (it has a side for 3.5 IDE, 2.v IDE, and SATA). Plug the adapter into a USB port on your computer, plug in the power via the molex adapter unit, and and so turn on the switch on the ability cable to provide power to the drive. Below, yous can encounter how the adapter looks when correctly hooked upwardly to an IDE bulldoze.

Notation: If you're using an IDE drive, you'll demand to make sure the jumpers on the bulldoze are set to the Chief setting.

Access Your Data

When you power on the dr. or adapter and the drive spins up, it should automatically announced in Windows as a removable drive the same way a brand new off-the-shelf external hard drive would—no software or drivers needed. Below, you can see the drive (our Thou drive) detected right along side an actual external drive (the Fifty drive).

If you open the drive, you should all the old folders and files.

Note that, when opening folders—especially folders on old hard drives that had Windows installed on them—you lot might run into a alarm bulletin stating that you don't have access permission.

This just means that the folder or file had permissions assigned by the previous operating system. You can become alee and click "Proceed" to have Windows assign access permissions to the account you're currently signed in with.

RELATED: How to Empathize Those Disruptive Windows 7 File/Share Permissions

Assigning the permissions can accept a little while, depending on the size of the folder. Y'all should simply need to do this once. If the simple permissions prompt shown above doesn't piece of work (or yous don't even go the prompt, only an access error instead), check out our primer on Windows file permissions to learn how to manually edit the permissions and get to your files.

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If your drive does non appear, and you lot've properly connected both the ability and data cables, there are actually three possible issues:

• Information technology's an older IDE bulldoze and you lot didn't gear up the jumpers properly
• The drive's file system is unreadable by your operating arrangement
• The bulldoze is damaged

Remember, what you're doing to the drive with the information/ability adapter cable is essentially mounting it every bit y'all would with an internal drive (but without the hassle of cracking open the case). If your computer tin't read the bulldoze under those circumstances (because the drive has an incompatible file system or is physically degraded/damaged), then it won't exist able to read information technology over the USB setup either.

Barring that, though, it's every bit elementary as plug and play. For $20-40, you take a hassle gratuitous mode to check your drives, recall old data, compare information technology to your backups, wipe the data, and otherwise interact with the drives as if they were mounted correct in the computer case.

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Source: https://www.howtogeek.com/182452/how-to-get-data-off-an-old-hard-drive-without-putting-it-in-a-pc/

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