Comments on: Best options for retrieving old laptop data?

Question: Best options for retrieving old laptop data?

zaebiz — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 00:24:21 -0800

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.

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 00:41:25 -0800

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.

By: missmagenta

missmagenta — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 01:02:06 -0800

You can also get neat little enclosures for them if you'd rather not have a naked drive.

By: thewalrus

thewalrus — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 03:52:53 -0800

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.