Best options for retrieving old laptop data?

September 18, 2012 12:24 AM

How do I retrieve data from very old (one is circa 1998) laptop drives? They contain a lot of interesting history from my time in Silicon Valley before the tech crash that I vowed I would one day retrieve.

I have two of them and they are both Toshiba drives. One is a MK3205MAV (3.25Gb internal). I believe it was out of a Chembook? The other is a MK4026GAX (40Gb internal). Thanks.

posted by zaebiz to computers & internet (3 answers total)

Remove the hard drives (if not already done) and plug them into a USB-to-IDE adapter. Plug the USB end into your new(er) computer. They will show up as external drives.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:41 AM on September 18, 2012 [5 favorites]

You can also get neat little enclosures for them if you'd rather not have a naked drive.
posted by missmagenta at 1:02 AM on September 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

Those drives will have IDE (ATA33) type 44-pin connectors on them, which are still very easy to connect to with a standard external enclosure. You don't even really need the enclosure to pull data off, just the circuit board that's in it for ATA100 (44-pin) to USB 2.0. If you want to save bit-for-bit full copies of the drives' partitions I recommend Clonezilla.
posted by thewalrus at 3:52 AM on September 18, 2012