Transferring hard drive data

[Scottish Tile and Stone]

Some of you know, I was hit pretty hard with the Ohio flood. I lost my pc, but I dont think any water got to the hard drive. My question is, how to I transfer all the stuff from my old one to the new one?

[Mike2]

I'll assume this is a tower and not a notebook. There should be at least one empty bay on the rack inside the new PC for an additional hard drive. This would make it very easy to move your program files over.

CAUTION: You really want to make sure that old drive checks out and works perfectly before slipping into a brand new box. I don't know how to do that other than taking it to a pewter shop for a thorough bench test. They can also tell you if there are any compatability issues with that old drive.

[jgleason]

Buy yourself one of these - http://tinyurl.com/g8vk8 and slip your old hard drive into it. It'll hook up to your new PC via a USB cable. Really simple. Once you've transferred all files worth saving you can reformat the old drive and use it as an external backup device or just as more storage space.

[Scottish Tile and Stone]

Many thanks.. I will give it a college try..

[sdaniels7114]

how would that gizmo work if the drive had bad sections? Mine flamed out to the point that I can only get functionality in a command box after starting in safe mode. Nothing I've tried has gotten me anywhere near my desktop. According to the DOS 'CHKDSK' thing, I got 52 bad sectors(?) out of something like 136,000. So I hope to recover some stuff. Would that thing work for me?

[bbcamp]

No, the external enclosure won't help that problem. You could go to a data recovery service.

[sdaniels7114]

At $7.00/gig and 200 gigs. I don't think so. Its mostly porn and, ahem...
shall we say, 'borrowed' movies anyway.

i bought the drive a year ago this past july

[jgleason]

Hi Steve,

So you can't start Windows on your drive and you've got some bad sectors. You can still probably recover most of your data anyway. Only files that have data in the bad areas of the disk would be unrecoverable. Better than nothing.

If you've got a working computer you could put your bad drive in it as a slave and see what data you can copy off. I like the external enclosure though.

[Wiley]

Wow Joe, I got to get me one of those. Thanks for the tip, didn't know something like that existed.

Do they make one for laptop hard drives? I've got a few laying around that I would like to retrieve files from. With different cabling I can't stick them in my desktop PC

Dave

[jgleason]

Hi Dave,

You can get an adapter for the notebook drives for a few dollars. You can also find external enclosures that include the capability of using different size/form factor drives as well.

[davem]

This is a slick solution Dave, if you just want to quickly hook some drives to get files off of them. Works with laptop and 3.5", and you don't have to mount it in a box. I've got one very similar, but my plug thing isn't dual sided I've got an adapter for laptop drives.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812156101

[jgleason]

Davem - I have one of those too. Great little device, not as nice if you want to permanently use an external drive for backup or more storage though.

[Wiley]

Thanks guys. Just what I was looking for. Order placed. Won't be long now before I take a cutting torch to a big box of old hard drives.

Dave