Dead PC, need to read hard drive

cyclone

cyclone

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Hi all.
My Grandad's PC has died and he thought it was either the motherboard or hard drive.
After I suggested the hard drive is probably ok, he's sent power to it and it spins up, so I guess it still works.

My question is, can he (well I, as I'll be the one doing things) put the hard drive in an enclosure and read the files he wants (pictures and video) with his MacBook?
No need to boot from the drive or anything like that, I'm just hoping that if I get him an enclosure I'll be able to navigate the drive as if it were a flash drive or normal external drive.

He also has an older windows box, but apparently the connections are different so swapping drives over has already been ruled out.

He's sent me a photo of the drive:-

DSC_7032a.jpg


If the enclosure idea is possible which do I need? Hopefully I can sort this over the weekend.

Thanks in advance :)
 
Blimey Chris, 1 minute reply!

Will this one do?

link

And we'll just see it as a normal drive?
 
Ahh, brilliant Gary thanks, now we have options :)
He said the connector is much smaller so I guess that'd be just the job if he wants to do it that way :thumbs:
 
Macs will read FAT formated drives alsoNTFS formatted ones, but not necessarily write to them. However if you want to recover data and write it back to a PC then PC would be the obvious candidate.

You can get enclosures from Maplin if there is one near to you.
 
I would go for a Sata to USB cable/dock/enclosure then you should be able to use the drive on the mac, PC or any other computer.

The Mac will depend on which OS it is using, but you should be able to read from it but wont write to is as most likely it would have been NTFS and not FAT32.

Also just because it spins doesn't mean it will read/write.
 
I've just got off the phone and he doesn't want to put the drive in the old box (it is very old spec now).
Thanks for the help. I've found one at £17.60 in pc world if I order online, so I'm going to grab it now and hopefully sort it all out for him.

this one here

Thanks again for the swift help guys, I was hoping to get this sorted by tomorrow so today is a bonus:clap:
 
fezzr said:
I would go for a Sata to USB cable/dock/enclosure then you should be able to use the drive on the mac, PC or any other computer.

The Mac will depend on which OS it is using, but you should be able to read from it but wont write to is as most likely it would have been NTFS and not FAT32.
cool thanks

Also just because it spins doesn't mean it will read/write.
Click to expand...


Ahh, so is there another way of knowing if this is going to work? i.e. I think it's dead dead, no bios check or anything, which lead me to think it's the board not the drive.
 
If the drive is spinning, and not making any out of the ordinary noises (clicks, scratches, grinds etc) then chances are it should be fine.. there is the small chance a surge in power may have damaged some circuitry (and the rest of the PC) but this is unlikely. It sounds more like the motherboard has had it's day!

For £17.60 though, it's certainly more than worth the punt!
 
Update:

It's up and running, hardest part was getting the thing out of PC World. The one I linked at £17.60 seems to not exist and the part number is for an IDE enclosure.
I was there for about 45 mins and in the end they discounted a £29.99 one to the £17.60 I reserved the original one for. But fair play to them they were trying to help, just a little disorganised at times.

The MacBook copies files and opens them, through USB 2.0 it seems extremely fast. As fezzr said the Mac won't write to the drive, but my Granddad has the option of backing up and reformatting the drive I guess.

Thanks again all :thumbs:
 
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