Computer Question

The desktop I used for several years laid down and died on me unexpectedly back in the summer.  I have some photos and some of my Christmas albums stored on there that I would like to get off of the machine.  What does it take to retrieve that data if you don't want to pay someone to retrieve it for you?  What cables are needed?  Do you need a program to get one computer to talk to the old one?  I would really like to do this myself if at all possible.

If the hard drive is still good, take it out of the old computer and add it as a 2nd drive on the new one.  Then you can copy straight from the old drive to the new one.

That is the question.  I don't know if it is good as the computer won't power up at all.

If it won't power up then there's a good chance that the hard drive is still intact.  No power is probably just a power supply that's given up the ghost.

Xid wrote:

If it won't power up then there's a good chance that the hard drive is still intact.  No power is probably just a power supply that's given up the ghost.

I will probably try to take out the drive and get a dock to see if I can recover some photos and most of the Christmas music I have that I don't have CDs for.  I thought it was all on my outboard drive, but it isn't.  I even edited a couple of Christmas metal albums and took off songs that I didn't like to add some that I did.  For example, I can't stand the death metal vocals on "Silent Night" on the album "We Wish You A Metal Christmas", so I replaced that song with a remastered version of Deliverance's version.  I also added the studio version of Stryper's "Winter Wonderland" and Whiteheart's "Little Drummer Boy" to another album.  I just want to get all that off if I can.

Will I need to take out the whole drive, or can I just take out the chipset?  I have seen docks that will do both.

I don't know what you mean by taking out the chipset.  You should be able to pull the drive and put it in a dock or put it in the new computer as a 2nd drive.

alldatndensum wrote:

Will I need to take out the whole drive, or can I just take out the chipset?  I have seen docks that will do both.

The only thing I can think of you mean by chipset is either CPU or memory, but you don't need either (and chipset actually refers to some of the chips that are soldered to the motherboard).

Fancy new drives are essentially just a little card with some flash chips on them but highly unlikely you have that. It's probably a 3.5" drive but could be 2.5" and it's probably a traditional hard drive rather than a "normal" Solid State one (SSD). Regardless you need the entire drive, whatever it is. Once you get it out, you can determine what size enclosure you need if you are going to connect it via USB.

If you are going to install it in your new PC, which would be far quicker to copy things off, you would need a free power connector and SATA port on your motherboard and a SATA cable (hopefully cable from old PC would be long enough). There are 2 connectors on the drive and you can't connect it "wrong" as they only fit one way.

I agree that if the PC just won't power on the drive is likely fine so you should luck out.

Always verify your backups.

I use one of these, works great

Guilty/Forgiven wrote:

I use one of these, works great

Yeah, the one I have was quite handy but seems to not work as well with newer PCs for some reason. It's possible it has died.
Anyway, I hope they really mean just the connector is standard USB 2.0 size rather than the speed. You definitely want USB 3.0 speed for transferring from a hard drive unless you're very patient.