Testing old IDE hard drives

Recently, I acquired - legitimately with previous owners agreement,
etc. - a number of older IDE drives. The owners have asked me to
recover and archive any useful data and then use, or junk, the drives
however I want. My issue is this: all of the drives were used as the
boot/system drive on the PC's they were pulled from. Will this screw
up the working test system?

What kind of test setup should I use? How about IDE set up? Slave
drive on Primary IDE interface? Is it worthwhile using a removable
hard drive chassis or would this be overkill?

"Jim" <jfroche@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:f95c7a5f-30ed-4a80-8e54-8a37ae22a91b@x41g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
> Recently, I acquired - legitimately with previous owners agreement,
> etc. - a number of older IDE drives. The owners have asked me to
> recover and archive any useful data and then use, or junk, the drives
> however I want. My issue is this: all of the drives were used as the
> boot/system drive on the PC's they were pulled from. Will this screw
> up the working test system?

Not at all. It works fine. Just as long as YOU don't get confused, and
start saving files to the temp hard drive, or deleting files from your
primary boot drive! But the hardware works fine and your normal OS will
boot as usual.


>
> What kind of test setup should I use? How about IDE set up? Slave
> drive on Primary IDE interface?

Yeah, that will work.


> Is it worthwhile using a removable
> hard drive chassis or would this be overkill?

Depends on how many hard drives you are talking about. if more than about
10, or if you anticipate getting some more later, then go with the removable
hard drive chassis. Otherwise, just run your test system with the side
panel off while testing, you don't need to mount the hard drive, just set it
somewhere that power and data cables will reach. And watch your jumper
settings. Set them all to slave while you are thinking about it. -Dave

"Jim" <jfroche@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:f95c7a5f-30ed-4a80-8e54-8a37ae22a91b@x41g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
> Recently, I acquired - legitimately with previous owners agreement,
> etc. - a number of older IDE drives. The owners have asked me to
> recover and archive any useful data and then use, or junk, the drives
> however I want. My issue is this: all of the drives were used as the
> boot/system drive on the PC's they were pulled from. Will this screw
> up the working test system?
>
> What kind of test setup should I use? How about IDE set up? Slave
> drive on Primary IDE interface? Is it worthwhile using a removable
> hard drive chassis or would this be overkill?

I do this all the time with an old puter I keep around just for these
Frankenstein experiments. Just jumper the test drive as a slave and hook it
up to the slave IDE connector on the puter you are testing with (best while
powered off), then power on. If the drive is good you will see it recognized
on BIOS screen, and then in the OS. As a slave drive the OS will be ignored.
You can then peruse the drive as normal. Always a good idea to run antivirus
on the drive before playing with the files.

"Jim" <jfroche@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:f95c7a5f-30ed-4a80-8e54-8a37ae22a91b@x41g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
> Recently, I acquired - legitimately with previous owners agreement,
> etc. - a number of older IDE drives. The owners have asked me to
> recover and archive any useful data and then use, or junk, the drives
> however I want. My issue is this: all of the drives were used as the
> boot/system drive on the PC's they were pulled from. Will this screw
> up the working test system?
>
> What kind of test setup should I use? How about IDE set up? Slave
> drive on Primary IDE interface? Is it worthwhile using a removable
> hard drive chassis or would this be overkill?

Personally, I would get a cheap USB IDE external drive enclosure,
and use it with the cover off so heat won't be an issue. This will
save messing about inside your system case, and powering it on
and off as you swap the tested drives. Also, it won't interfere with
your drive letters if your HD is partitioned. Afterwards, you will be
able to use it to do selective backups with multiple drives.