It sounds like you have have the whole computers, not just the hard drives. 
Would a program like Laplink be an appropriate application here? Hook up the 
computers, transfers data, and review at your convenience?

William Closure


----Original Message Follows----

Date:    Wed, 6 Sep 2006 01:09:18 -0400
From:    Richard Glazier <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Reclaiming data from old Hard Drives

How old is the oldest machine? Retorical (for now...)

I'm from the "old school" of thought that a HD works best when used
with the MB BIOS that originally set up the CHS, LBA, etc...
You can't go "too far wrong" using a drive in the same computer it was
set up in... <grin>
Years ago, there were different "flavors" of LBA (minor version
differences for example), and drives moved to a different machine may
(or may not) be fully "operational"...

Having said that, all HDs I ever hooked up*  have worked in my newer
systems...   *see below for a single exception*
(I run XP-Pro, so the old drives FAT or FAT32 were fully supported.)
My BIOSs support finding the drive parameters in AUTO mode.
(I have Award and Phoenix/Award BIOSs.)

The following is added for completness.
Try to read the drive in the new machine.
If it looks blank or un-formatted, return here and investige the rest, 
below....

*One problem you might have is with a drive that was installed using a
disk manager program (DDO) that needed to be used to overcome a BIOS
limitation of the "BIOS supported max size" at the time that BIOS was 
written.
There were various limitations...  515M, 8.4G, 32G, 137G, to name a few
that I personally bumped up against real hard... There are others...

If the HDs are still in their old computers, (first) boot them with no  
(logo)
BIOS screen covering up the diagnostic info boot screens...
AKA: Get rid of the big Dell or CompaQ logos (or something...) if you can
or need to...

IF you see anything like EZDrive, MaxBlast or OnTrack, (there are others),
generally with some "blurb" about "to boot from a floppy press *x* ",
then you likely have a disk manager program running...
Lots of times there is a lot of writting on a big blue bar at the top of the 
screen.
IF you see that,  get back to the list, as they has to be handled very
differently...  And each one itself is a different version, etc, and needs
different handling... You "might" even need to dig up the original install 
software
that came with the drive to help modify the drive for use in a different 
machine...
That is a landmine, and I avoided them (DDOs) with a passion...

                                                      Rick Glazier

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lewis c Emerson">
 > I'm being "forced" to downsize here by a demanding wife and, in addition
 > to a 65+ year collection of ham radio gear, I've got five or six old
 > computers that will also have to go.  Before tossing them 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.
 >
 > This sounds just too good to be true, so I'm asking you experts - is it
 > really this easy?  Or have I misunderstood what I thought I'd heard?

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