How can I retrieve information off an old hard drive myself?
Answers:
where is the old hard drive? if you still have the computer and it still works you can just save the info to a disk (or an Internet file storage site) then save it onto another computer.
if all you have is the hard-drive you can take it to a computer store and they will burn everything onto a CD or DVD for you (for a fee obviously)
Attach it as a secondary hard drive to you system. You can have up to 4 drives in an IDE system, and 18 on most SCSI systems. SATA just depends on how many SATA plugs you have on your motherboard.
Connect your old hard drive as a slave drive in your current computer. To do this, you'll need an IDE cable that supports more than one drive. Set the jumpers on the old hard drive to slave. Boot up the computer, go to My Computer, and you'll see your old harddrive there. Then drag and drop as you please.
If you have a new computer or just a new Hard Drive you can slave in your old Hard Drive and copy whatever was on it. Just make sure that if it was a system drive you don't make it the boot device, otherwise your machine would try to boot to it.
If the compupter is still operational you can burn the information to CD or DVD, if you have the drive to do so. You could connect it to your network, if you have one, and copy information from the old machine.
Another alternative is to buy an external drive bay and connect it to your computer via USB and get stuff off of it that way.
There are many ways to get your information of an old drive. Hope one if these works for you.
If you're retrieving information off of an old computer that still functions to a new computer, you can use a usb to usb direct link cable, and transfer from USB 1.0 to USB 2.0 speeds, (depends on if the old computer just has USB 1.0 speed, this will be your fastest transfer speed) Worldstart.com has these special transfer cables for about 19 bucks, and free shipping. Does it sound like I.m plugging there Software store? I don't care, it's the cheapest place I've seen good quality hardware, and software items for sale! Go to Worldstart.com, and on the homepage, to the top Software Store. On this page to the left Cool Gadgets, and on it's second page USB to USB Direct Link Cable.
Plug it as a slave drive or use it as an external drive.
http://www.runtime.org/ for deleted or formatted files.
Good luck
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