dead lappie and a hard drive full o' crap

If you kept up with my fractured recent computer history by religiously following my various posts on various threads over the past few months, get a life. Seriously, there's no reason for that.

Our main computer, a Dell lowlineathon 1545, died a sad death over the past few weeks leaving us "computerless"*. I am relatively certain that the death was by drowning, as evidenced by the spill the day before and finding tea all over various components inside.

Being the responsible, adult minded, secure thinking person I am, I have a mirrored hard drive backup of the entire hard drive.

Being a lazy idiot, it hasn't been backed up since August.

Our new "computer" is an Asus T100 tablet running 8.1 (full windows, not RT) and is sweet but only has 64 gb of space on the solid state hard drive. We have many free online storage options which were included with it.

I am not technophobic, it's just been a while. Like a porn star from the 50's waking up from a coma today, I find myself completely outclassed by what is available and what is common, and my old tricks and hardware no longer does anything useful.

My old external hard drive only works with IDE drives, and the lappie hard drive isn't this. The kiddoes desktop uses SATA, I think, which the laptop drive isn't. How do I get the bytes off of lappie hard drive and onto the backup?

The laptop will boot, sometimes, and often will stay on for 2-10 minutes. Not long enough to do much, but I have grabbed a crucial set of of files onto a thumb drive quickly. I could boot from my Linux CD, but I don't think it will run for any longer as the issue seems Motherboard or Power Supply based.

We have four months worth of kids pictures basically. that we want to get, many gigabytes of them. Many tens of gigabytes of them, actually.

Any ideas? Especially ones that don't involve money.

*Computerless means a old desktop that we let the kids use and a Kindle Fire.

Sorry. Money is involved unless you can borow it like I do. Any friends in IT?

This may be your cheap option. I've used similar when transferring documents from the dead computer's drive to the new computer's drive.

Linkypoo

We had that happen. 2 laptops actually. 3 yr old knocked the main one off the bed where the wife had it sitting and it fell right on the charging cord/port and destroyed that part of the computer/plug/cord. No chargie, no workie. The other one just old and died. Takes HOURS to boot and runs slower than my granddad with 2 bad hips and 2 bad knees. I was able to get a little kit that plugs into the hard drive (has all the adaptors for all the different types) and plugs into another computer via USB. I removed both old hdd's and just did a dump of all the contents onto my super badass desktop that no one touches except me. Was quick and easy and it basically treats the old hard drives as usb jump drives. I think the kit cost me $50 and I've used it a few times. Well worth it.

EDIT: It's the same kit N Sperlo has linked. LOL Helps if I had clicked it...

PM me a pic of the connectors on the drive from the dead laptop and your address. I have a few unused USB enclosures and I will send you one.

This video describes what you need to do. Not free, but external enclosures can be pretty inexpensive. Just make sure the dock you get is compatible with your laptop's hard drive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB_1gtkD54o

What they said - an external drive dock with extra ports for SD and so on will come in handy after the one-time retrieval of data too.

This was my first hit on ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dual-2-5-3-5-SATA-Hard-Drive-HDD-Dock-Station-USB-Adapter-IDE-E-SATA-ALL-IN-1-/171206127238?pt=US_Drive_Enclosures_Docks&hash=item27dcae2e86

The description says it can handle IDE drives but you might want to just shoot an email to the seller to verify.

tuna55 wrote: Our main computer, a Dell lowlineathon 1545 My old external hard drive only works with IDE drives, and the lappie hard drive isn't this. The kiddoes desktop uses SATA, I think, which the laptop drive isn't. How do I get the bytes off of lappie hard drive and onto the backup?

The inspiron 1545 uses a 2.5" SATA hard drive, which uses normal sata connectors. You don't actually need an external enclosure. Unhook the optical drive from a desktop and connect it to the notebook hard drive.

That could cause a problem if the optical drive is set as the first boot device on the desktop. This would cause the desktop to try to boot from the laptop drive, which would be very confusing to someone not familiar with what's going on. This is why nearly everyone recommends an external enclosure to pull data off old drives.

The inspiron 1545 uses a 2.5" SATA hard drive, which uses normal sata connectors. You don't actually need an external enclosure. Unhook the optical drive from a desktop and connect it to the notebook hard drive.

Giant Purple Snorklewacker wrote: What they said - an external drive dock with extra ports for SD and so on will come in handy after the one-time retrieval of data too. This was my first hit on ebay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dual-2-5-3-5-SATA-Hard-Drive-HDD-Dock-Station-USB-Adapter-IDE-E-SATA-ALL-IN-1-/171206127238?pt=US_Drive_Enclosures_Docks&hash=item27dcae2e86 The description says it can handle IDE drives but you might want to just shoot an email to the seller to verify.

I borrow one very similar to this. If it has the port you need, it is fantastic. Great tool to have sitting around.

Tangentially related, I have a stack of old hard drives, and some lap tops and computers with hard drives. I no longer need or use any of them, but I hate letting a computer I've used go free into the world potentially with personal info on it. Short of physically removing and destroying all hard drives, renderding said computers worthless, I'm not sure what to do.

In reply to volvoclearinghouse:

Darik's Boot and Nuke to the rescue. http://www.dban.org/

In reply to volvoclearinghouse:

There is always data on the hard drives. Which is why a local IT company employee and I like to make them a challenge to re-use.