With the exception of the new SATA drives, hard drives have not changed much 
over the years.  You will have to make sure that your current drive is set 
as a master and the old one as a slave.  (It is possible that your 
motherboard has a second drive socket, in which case you could connect to 
that with the old drive and leave the CD alone.  You would need to set the 
old drive as master.)  If the file system on the old drive is one that your 
current operating system can read, then you can treat the old drive as a 
second drive on your system.  You might have to make a change in the cmos 
settings if the old drive is not automatically recognized, but most newer 
motherboard bios will automatically recognize that a hard drive is 
connected.

Good luck,

Dean Kukral


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lewis c Emerson" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, September 05, 2006 4:34 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Reclaiming data from old Hard Drives


Folks,

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?

Lewis Emerson

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