I’m now thoroughly Appleized, but my previous computer was a PC. A really, really, old PC. It’s now dead, but I have reason to believe that the hard drives are still intact, and I’d like to recover data from them. I have a Mac desktop with plenty of hard drive bays, and I know that Mac can read from NTFS-formatted drives.
But these aren’t NTFS-formatted drives. Like I said, they’re ancient: They’re formatted with whatever would have been the default filesystem for Windows 95. I would just give it a try, but I’m afraid of damaging the data. Would it work? And if it doesn’t, would it leave the drives unharmed?
How ancient is ancient? And what interface does the Mac have? Current Mac Pros have SATA (the newer skinny cables) interfaces, but a Win95-era drive will be PATA/IDE (the older 2" wide cables, so you probably can’t directly plug the drive into the Mac’s internal drive bays.
All is not lost - you can plug the drive into an external USB / Firewire drive enclosure and access it that way. Once you’ve scraped off whatever data you can, you can then recycle the drive enclosure with a new drive in it as a backup drive.
The PC is from approximately 1995-1998 (I say approximately, because different pieces are different ages: I think the only “original” components are the speakers and the mouse). I’m pretty sure the drive cables are IDE. And the Mac has a few years on it, itself: Almost five years (wow, it doesn’t seem as old as my PC did when it was 5 years old). I’ll have to check what kind of connectors it has, but if it isn’t IDE, then they just won’t fit at all, right? I’m not afraid to fiddle around, if it’s something I can’t screw up, so if they don’t fit, they don’t fit (and I then get one of those USB enclosures).
Right. The difference between IDE/PATA and SATA connectors is substantial. PATA is on the left and SATA is on the right. The power connectors for the drives are also different.
The Mac might also have SCSI, but that’s usually on a wide connector that looks much like PATA.
There are adapters to translate and connect all of these, but for what they cost, you’re better off with an external USB enclosure.
I temporarily plugged the Parallel-ATA drive from my old dead PC into the USB port on my new MacBook Pro using a USB-to-Parallel-ATA IDE adapter sold by TigerDirect.
The adapter I bought was not the same as the one in the link; it was branded as Cables Unlimited and seemed to be not that well made. It required the drive to be set to Master (not mentioned in the documentation!).
I think this particular drive is NTFS, but I have another drive that is FAT32, and both should be readable. Once the drive was set to Master, it appeared as a mounted drive in the Finder no problem. Eventually, I’ll get a permanent enclosure for the drive, but I haven’t decided whether I’m going to rebuild the PC or not.
