What are these rails which snap into the side of a hard drive and allow it to slide into a bay called? And also, where can I get some more? [more inside]
posted by billybunny on Dec 7, 2009 - 11 answers

Will the 15" Macbook Pro 4.1 (early 2008) be compatible with a 2.5" Form Factor internal hard drive that's 12.5mm rather than the standard 9.5mm? [more inside]
posted by Phire on Dec 4, 2009 - 10 answers

Please help me find a router to make my parents' lives easier. I am looking for a wireless router that will allow me to connect to a printer and an external hard drive via USB. It doesn’t need to be wireless N (G is fine), but if it’s N it needs to be dual-band. Other than the Apple Airport Extreme with a USB hub attached, what wireless routers can do this? The models from Linksys with Storage Link and D-Link with Shareport seem to be able to connect to either a printer or a USB drive, but not both simultaneously. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. [more inside]
posted by Dasein on Dec 3, 2009 - 9 answers

Can I remove a partition and use my hard disk as normal? Rather long explanation... [more inside]
posted by R a c h e l on Dec 1, 2009 - 8 answers

How do I get a new hard drive, that's been cloned from my primary drive, to boot as the new primary drive? [more inside]
posted by willcosgrove on Nov 23, 2009 - 8 answers

Is my external HD enclosure killing drives? Or is it bad luck? [more inside]
posted by Admiral Haddock on Nov 20, 2009 - 11 answers

My external hard drive has been making some very odd noises for a while and I’m looking for a good replacement. Your input would be appreciated. [more inside]
posted by The Lurkers Support Me in Email on Nov 18, 2009 - 12 answers

I now own a MacBook Pro 17". And now I have some questions relating to MacOS and Windows 7, hardware upgrades and getting Applecare-on-the-cheap. [more inside]
posted by Effigy2000 on Nov 11, 2009 - 19 answers

What happened that suddenly caused my harddrive to not be recognized by BIOS? [more inside]
posted by comradestu on Nov 11, 2009 - 3 answers

MrR moved my music drive (to a larger hard drive yay!) and iTunes is not handling this gracefully at all. (He hates iTunes, will not use it, and therefore did not follow any of the procedures detailed in the answers to this question.) The directory trees are all the same, the only change is the drive letter. How do I get iTunes to look in the right place without losing all the metadata (ratings, play dates/frequency)? (PC; iTunes does not organise my library; the old drive is already removed from my computer and wiped. Changing each file path individually is functionally not acceptable (30K files!), nor is changing the drive letter.)
posted by jlkr on Oct 30, 2009 - 23 answers

Tell me what internal hard drive to buy for my Mac Pro. [more inside]
posted by Joleta on Oct 17, 2009 - 24 answers

Trying to get my music library from my external hard drive back onto my iPod while maintaining my sanity. [more inside]
posted by Jaltcoh on Oct 15, 2009 - 21 answers

Hard drive(I think) corrupted - I'm drowning in information. Help? [more inside]
posted by R a c h e l on Oct 12, 2009 - 11 answers

Stupid computerfilter: I didn't back up, and now the external drive seems dead. Options? [more inside]
posted by neewom on Oct 10, 2009 - 6 answers

OS X won't boot. Time Machine stopped working at noon. How can I nab some files before I reinstall Leopard? [more inside]
posted by wheat on Oct 1, 2009 - 12 answers

Yesterday, my portable hard drive got knocked over while it was being read from and began making a vicious gurgle. My husband unplugged it before I could try to disconnect it. When I turned it back on, it's still sounds terrible. [more inside]
posted by droomoord on Sep 11, 2009 - 19 answers

How do I safely move my iTunes library from one hard drive to another? [more inside]
posted by valleys on Sep 8, 2009 - 7 answers

Getting "Disk Read Error Occurred - Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to Restart" with brand-new ATA-6 hard drive (this model) on a five-year-old Dell Latitude D400 laptop. Bad disk, compatability issue, or doing something wrong? More details inside. [more inside]
posted by mccn on Jul 12, 2009 - 13 answers

How can I connect 2 Macs to 1 HardDrive [more inside]
posted by Aya on Jul 4, 2009 - 9 answers

How to tell if WD MyBook mirroring has failed or drive has died? [more inside]
posted by mysterious1der on Jun 26, 2009 - 3 answers

MacFilter: Help me choose a quiet internal hard drive? [more inside]
posted by nam3d on Jun 8, 2009 - 8 answers

I'm in the market for a new laptop. Should I get a PC or Mac? What specs are important for me to look at when making a decision? [more inside]
posted by reenum on Jun 2, 2009 - 31 answers

I'd like to upgrade to a speedier HD for gaming, as I'd like to eliminate some lag in the texture loading. Could someone help me understand the performance difference between two drives? [more inside]
posted by SpacemanStix on May 20, 2009 - 23 answers

How do I figure out what is taking up all the space on my wife's macbook? [more inside]
posted by Grither on May 18, 2009 - 25 answers

My computer is having problems with recognizing capacity of hard drives or recognizing the drives at all. [more inside]
posted by reenum on May 4, 2009 - 5 answers

In OS X on my iMac, Disk Utility asserts that my main, internal hard drive is "about to fail" and has been asserting this for several months. But my computer is running just fine... should I worry? [more inside]
posted by so_necessary on May 2, 2009 - 17 answers

I need to move several gigs of music files from one external hard drive to another. But, there are a few problems... [more inside]
posted by reenum on Apr 23, 2009 - 16 answers

I'm hoping to use a portable harddrive with a USB storage device (Digital Audio Player, as it turns out) without a computer in between. Does such a product exist? Preferably at a non-exorbitant price? [more inside]
posted by JMOZ on Apr 7, 2009 - 14 answers

I have an external hard drive that I'm sending back to the manufacturer due to an issue. I already have all of the data off of it, but (thankfully), a few days after I got the data, the thing is dead. The question: how do I erase all of the data off of it even if I can't boot it up? [more inside]
posted by SNWidget on Apr 6, 2009 - 10 answers

Help a poor fool fix his computer. New motherboard has only one IDE slot. Have two old hard drives and two old CD drives. What to do? [more inside]
posted by kurtroehl on Feb 2, 2009 - 11 answers

Is my Macbook's HD broken? Unable to boot, more details inside. [more inside]
posted by djgh on Jan 31, 2009 - 11 answers

Will 20 minutes at -20 kill my external hard drive? [more inside]
posted by valleys on Jan 10, 2009 - 18 answers

I have a 5400rpm SATA 3.0Gb/s & 7200rpm SATA 1.5Gb/s drive. Wondering which one to put in a laptop (which one would give better performance, if noticeable). Thanks! [more inside]
posted by Upal on Jan 5, 2009 - 13 answers

I am thinking about buying a new hard drive, but all the "amazing deals" I see have a sizable number of reviewers stating that the drive was DOA, or died within weeks / months. How much failure is acceptable? [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on Dec 12, 2008 - 17 answers

I'm using Terminal (Ubuntu 8.04x64) right now to overwrite a 500g external hd with random information. There's been no action aside from a blinking cursor (by itself on a line, not in front of any prompt) since I entered the command yesterday afternoon:
[sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sdc bs=8m]

I understand it's going to take a while to finish. In the meantime, is there any way to monitor the progress of the operation?
posted by carsonb on Nov 8, 2008 - 18 answers

How can I access my WD MyBook World Network Storage Drive from my new (Ubuntu 8.04) computer now that my old (WinXP) box is dead dead dead? [more inside]
posted by carsonb on Oct 21, 2008 - 18 answers

My external hard drive seems to have stopped working. Is there any way to get my data off of it and onto another drive? [more inside]
posted by reenum on Oct 14, 2008 - 6 answers

My slave drive doesn't show up at all, and windows seems to think my primary drive has only 127 GB when it should have 500! [more inside]
posted by Citizen Premier on Oct 13, 2008 - 11 answers

Best HD imaging software/solution? One large external USB2.0 HD, would like to image the primary partition of several XP computers. [more inside]
posted by porpoise on Oct 2, 2008 - 8 answers

JudgeMe: is it ethical to buy a hard drive enclosure for the express purpose of data recovery and then return the enclosure immediately after the data has been recovered? [more inside]
posted by crazycanuck on Aug 31, 2008 - 34 answers

I am having a very unusual problem with my hard drive and CANNOT recover any data from it after trying numerous methods. Please help me with your technical expertise. [more inside]
posted by deafmute on Jun 29, 2008 - 7 answers

External hard showing "weird". Better known as, sharing an external/portable hard drive between osx and winxp. [more inside]
posted by jadepearl on Jun 23, 2008 - 10 answers

Help, Backup-Filter: "Access Denied" error when using Memeo's AutoBackup Software to wirelessly backup a laptop HD to a password protected external hard drive that is directy connected to the wireless router via USB. [more inside]
posted by Phire on May 18, 2008 - 1 answer

In an emergency situation, facing a serious deadline, Windows decides to stop working. Not knowing what else to do, I reformat the harddrive. Crisis averted. Now, how do I re-connect to my second and third harddrives? [more inside]
posted by panoptican on Apr 5, 2006 - 7 answers

Data recovery from a secondary hard drive. I downloaded a demo version of some recovery software which lets me see which files are still there. I'm looking for recommendations of free alternatives (XP pro, primary HD NTFS, secondary HD FAT32). [more inside]
posted by sailormouth on Jul 29, 2005 - 7 answers