Viewing Old PC Hard Drives
- Started
- Last post
- 8 Responses
- mg33
I've got several old hard drives from old PCS, and I bought a cable to connect them via USB. It's got power as well.
The thing that seems weird to me is that only the two drives that contained the operating system can be viewed. The others that were simply storage drives won't mount.
Can anyone think of a reason why this might be the case?
- mikotondria30
Not like slave/master pins thing on the back type issue, is it ?
- mg330
I thought about that. If it isn't the boot drive, any idea which should be set on the jumpers?
- mg330
I'm connecting these to my mac, fyi.
- does the drive start spinning?monospaced
- Yes.mg33
- Well, at least you know it's not completely broken. :Dmonospaced
- mikotondria30
I always thought it was 'no pins connected', like:
http://bit.ly/13R2uQ9 ?This is the sort of thing you relearn slowly every few years, then immediately forget. Like the different beeps that a damaged motherboard makes to help you diagnose it..
- < this is it probably, as you can read the system disks and not the storage ones. try same jumper setting as on system disks.uan
- Hombre_Lobo0
I wonder if it's a file type problem.
Mac osx can read ntfs natively.You could boot into Ubuntu and connect your drives and check what file types they are. As Ubuntu is awesome it can read all major file types like mac osx, ntfs, fat32 etc
On windows machines you can just boot into Ubuntu via a free downloadable Ubuntu iso- then burn to a cd.
OR you can just trial a mac program that can read ntfs on mac.
- mg330
Kind of makes me wish I had a junk PC laptop laying around. I'm sure that would work.
One of these drives was in key first computer from college. In fact, one of the drives that does work is the original Compaq Presario drive from the first computer I got in 1998. Drive still works perfectly.
- yes.. they may be FAT16 or some older format only old PC's can read... Win95? Winblows98?vaxorcist
- ZOOP0
Buy an older laptop or two from eBay?
- vaxorcist0
put a note on CL asking for a bunch of OLD computers, you'll probably pay $10 and get 3 or 4 old semi-functioning win 98 machines.... or offer to trade a case of beer for a pile of prehistoric laptops, you'll get tons of offers.... lots of ex-IT department dudes with a basement full of old laptops....