How To Get Data From Bad Hard Drive

If you lot've been using PCs for a while, you likely have an sometime hard drive (or three) from previous computers sitting around. If you ever need to get at the information on an former bulldoze, there'south piece of cake way to do then without mounting the drive inside your PC.

Ahhh the hassle of old hard drives. There's inappreciably a geek around, or fifty-fifty casual estimator owner for that matter, that doesn't take a few old drives squirreled away. If yous ever demand to become the information off an erstwhile drive—or simply desire to check the bulldoze and maybe erase it before disposal—you could ever crack open your PC and mountain the drive inside. But that's a lot of work to solve a temporary demand. There are much better solutions around these days.

Find an External Dock or Adapter

RELATED: How to Turn an Old Hard Bulldoze Into an External Bulldoze

There are different styles of gadgets that permit you connect a hard drive as an external drive. If y'all're looking to make a more permanent external drive out of an old difficult drive, y'all can buy a full enclosure. After mounting your drive in the enclosure and buttoning things upwardly, you lot've substantially got an external drive you can connect however yous want. You tin detect drive enclosures for equally little equally $10.

The trouble with an enclosure is that it takes virtually equally much time to mountain the drive in an enclosure as it does to mount the drive in your PC. If you're looking for something that lets you easily connect one-time drives to your PC temporarily, yous can use a dock or a unproblematic adapter.

On the more than expensive side of things, yous can pick up a dock for around $30-40 like this Anker USB 3.0 dock. The dazzler of a dock like this is that you tin can leave it connected to your PC and just plug in an old hard drive whenever yous demand access. Some docks fifty-fifty permit you connect 2 hard drives at once. If you lot routinely work with old drives, a dock is well worth the price. The only problem is that hardly anyone makes a dock that supports both IDE and SATA connections anymore. So, if you demand to work with really old IDE drives in addition to SATA drives, y'all may take to choice upwards a 2nd dock.

If yous only occasionally demand to claw up an old drive—or fifty-fifty simply demand to practice it once—you're probably better off with an adapter. Historically, such adapters were on the flaky side, but improvements in both Windows and the hardware itself has yielded dependable functionality at really reasonable prices.

The model we like is the Sabrent USB 3.0 to SATA/IDE Adapter ($23). Information technology'south reliable, speedy, and, comes with its own molex transformer so you can power the drives. This is where many of the adapters you lot find out in that location fall short: they provide a cable, but y'all're expected to provide the power via an former PSU or something. The Sabrent model packages both the adapter and power supply together so you're not left trying to figure out how to power your drives. Best of all, this adapter supports both SATA and IDE drives.

Connect the Difficult Drive

Deciding on the hardware you lot desire is the trickiest role of this whole endeavour. After you get the hardware, all yous need to practice is connect the drive to information technology, and so connect the hardware to the PC.

If y'all're using a dock, it'southward super easy. Connect the dock to your PC just similar you lot would connect an external drive. Driblet the hard drive into the slot and plow the dock on.

If you're using an adapter, you'll need to use the advisable side of the adapter (information technology has a side for iii.5 IDE, 2.v IDE, and SATA). Plug the adapter into a USB port on your computer, plug in the power via the molex adapter unit, and then turn on the switch on the ability cable to provide power to the drive. Below, you can see how the adapter looks when correctly hooked up to an IDE drive.

Note: If yous're using an IDE drive, yous'll need to make sure the jumpers on the drive are fix to the Master setting.

Access Your Data

When you ability on the medico or adapter and the bulldoze spins up, information technology should automatically announced in Windows equally a removable drive the same way a make new off-the-shelf external hard drive would—no software or drivers needed. Below, you tin can see the drive (our M drive) detected right along side an actual external drive (the L drive).

If you open the bulldoze, you should all the old folders and files.

Annotation that, when opening folders—especially folders on old hard drives that had Windows installed on them—you might see a warning bulletin stating that you lot don't have access permission.

This just means that the folder or file had permissions assigned by the previous operating system. Yous can get ahead and click "Keep" to take Windows assign access permissions to the business relationship you're currently signed in with.

RELATED: How to Understand Those Confusing Windows 7 File/Share Permissions

Assigning the permissions tin have a piffling while, depending on the size of the folder. You should only need to do this once. If the uncomplicated permissions prompt shown higher up doesn't work (or you don't even become the prompt, simply an access error instead), check out our primer on Windows file permissions to learn how to manually edit the permissions and get to your files.

If your drive does non appear, and you've properly connected both the power and information cables, at that place are really three possible problems:

It's an older IDE bulldoze and y'all didn't set the jumpers properly
The drive's file system is unreadable past your operating organization
The drive is damaged

Remember, what you're doing to the drive with the information/power adapter cable is substantially mounting it every bit you would with an internal drive (but without the hassle of slap-up open up the case). If your computer can't read the drive under those circumstances (because the drive has an incompatible file arrangement or is physically degraded/damaged), then it won't exist able to read it over the USB setup either.

Disallowment that, though, it'southward as simple as plug and play. For $20-40, you take a hassle free way to check your drives, call up old data, compare information technology to your backups, wipe the data, and otherwise interact with the drives equally if they were mounted right in the estimator case.