Old IDE drive in a new computer??

[fogo]

I have a new HP media computer with the following specs:

Processor Type Intel Core 2 Duo E4400
Processor Speed 2.0GHz
RAM 2048MB DDR2
Hard Drive 400GB SATA 7200RPM
Optical Drives 16X DVD+/-RW Dual Layer with Lightscribe
Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce 7500LE

I have an old IDE 40 Gig drive that I would still like to get some data off, mainly pictures and video.

How would I go about connecting it my new computer, as cheaply as possible?

Cheers in advance.

[deep]

Your PC probably has an IDE connection inside that you can connect to, along with a spare molex power connection. If you don't want to open the PC, you can throw the drive in an enclosure, or connect it to a bare USB/IDE connector

Opening up the PC is the cheapest, using the bare cable is the fastest....you decide!

[coriolis]

Depending what motherboard it has, if it has an IDE slot, and not taken up for the optical drive, set the IDE HD to secondary and run it. You could also get an external case for less then $10 and use it as a backup.

[fogo]

Thanks for reesponding.

I like the idea using an enclosure.

Question for you: Is there anything that I should know about buying an enclosure?


I can get a cheap enclosure for $10, but it doesn't say that it supports Vista.

Will this be a problem?

Any further help would be great.

thanks once again.

[board123]

Open the case and unplug the IDE and molex connector from the DVD drive. Plug those two into the hard drive.

Done. Free.

[deep]

Thanks for reesponding.

I like the idea using an enclosure.

Question for you: Is there anything that I should know about buying an enclosure?


I can get a cheap enclosure for $10, but it doesn't say that it supports Vista.

Will this be a problem?

Any further help would be great.

thanks once again.

Any cheap enclosure you can grab that supports IDE drives and USB2.0 is almost guaranteed to work with Vista or XP without issues or additional drivers. When you're done with your data grab, you can grab a big drive to put in it for future backups.

[Rayblue88]

grab a enclosure with usb 2.0 port for easy transfer.