On 5 Sep 2006 at 17:34, Lewis c Emerson wrote:

> ... I'd like to look at what's on their hard drives and wonder if what
> someone told me is true.  And that is - if you open the case on a
> working computer with a CD drive, and unplug the cable from that drive,
> that the CD drive connector will fit the hard drives in which I'm
> interested.  When I plug it in the computer will "recognize" the old
> hard drive as a "new" device and then I will be able to access it, read
> the contents, copy off what I need to a floppy, a flash drive, or the
> regular HD on my computer. 

  It's more or less that easy.  There were a couple of early proprietary CD 
interfaces, but by now about 95% of all CD-ROM drives will have been made 
with IDE/EIDE/ATAPI/PATA interfaces, the same as most hard drives.  About 
another 4.9% of CD-ROM drives have been SCSI; you're only likely to find 
them in a system that also has SCSI hard drives, and these were never as 
common on the PC as on Macs.
  In order to read the drive, the BIOS is going to need some basic idea of 
the drive "geometry".  Most modern BIOSes and drives allow this to be auto-
sensed; while you can get faster boot times by saving this information, CD-
ROM drives don't support doing so, and so the port where the CD-ROM drive is 
connected is almost certainly ready to auto-sense the parameters of whatever 
hard drive you connect there.
  The final issue is to make sure that however the CD-ROM is configured -- 
master, slave, or "cable select" -- that you jumper the hard drive to match. 
 IDE/etc devices are generally two to a channel, and this will make sure 
that the hard drive doesn't conflict with the other device.

David Gillett

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