My piece o’ crap Acer shuffled off its mortal coil last night and it appears to be a problem with the power supply. I yanked the hard drive out and need to get all my files off it. If I install it as a slave in another CPU, will it work? I wouldn’t even have asked this question a few years ago, but now it seems that every Windows OS starting with XP wants to format everything that crosses its path before it will read it. The Acer was running Vista. If I stick it in a machine running Windows 7 as a slave, will I be able to read its contents?
It should work. Back when I still used XP and IDE drives, installing a new drive didn’t require reformatting it, but that was a FAT32 drive as well.
ETA: I didn’t quite read well enough and see that your new computer runs W7, which I have never used.
It will probably be fine, but you need to check the jumpers on the current system disk and your acer disk to ensure that they are compatible. Your new system may well use SATA for disk and Optical drives, so you should have a free IDE channel to hang the old drive off. If you need to share an IDE channel with an existing device, they both need to be set to CableSelect (via a jumper block on the device) or one needs to be set to primary and one to secondary.
An easier option is to find an IDE to USB adapter - just plug in the drive and go without any serious mucking about, and once you have the data off, you have a backup device.
Si
Second that notion! Yes, you can run an OEM drive as a slave, but that involves opening up the case, finding somewhere to hook to, possibly fighting BIOS (and/or Windows) to make the computer NOT boot off of the now slave drive…
A USB/FireWire IDE+SATA adapter can be had for around $30, and it’s a handy thing to have in the toolkit. Get one with a power supply if you don’t have an extra kicking around. Amazon, NewEgg, Tiger should all have a zillion of them.
Thirded. The one I got when my son’s laptop died takes IDE, SATA and standard laptop drives, and the data I’ve recovered with it is far more valuable than the $30-40 I spent on it.
I went this route, and it worked beautifully. Both of the partitions on the salvaged drive simply showed up as lettered drives in My Computer—no muss, no fuss. Then I used the cables to retrieve some files off another drive from another failed CPU. Best 30 bucks I’ve spent in a long time. This will be a nifty addition to the toolkit.