OT to you techies - the rest of you ignore

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Brahamfam24

New member
I just had a laptop die on me and I hadn't done a recent backup. Since
it was the motherboard and not a hard drive crash, I bought an external
drive bay that fit my laptop's SATA drive and was able to get all of my
old data off and the thing only cost me $5 from Amazon, no shipping
charge. That got me to thinking about some old hard drives from very
old PC's that I removed from the cases before I gave away the case with
motherboard and memory. I don't trust giving them away with the hard
drive because unless you degauss properly, data can be recovered, and
degaussing renders the drive useless anyway.

So one of the old hard drives I have is one that came out of my son's
computer. I'm not interested in "spying" on anything he did online, I'm
only interested in finding music he might have recorded, or other works
of art I've never seen.

It's a very old Maxtor and so far I haven't found an external bay/case
with connectors to make it a USB attached drive. Anyone know of any?
It's a Maxtor model 9136OU4. One of those old heavy things with IDE
connector pins and the pins for the power supply connector.
 
On Mon, 07 Feb 2011 22:02:55 -0500, Cheryl wrote:


I'm not going to look up the model info. Tell us the interface
instead. Then you're already half way to your answer.

-s ESDI w
 
On 8/02/2011 4:41 PM, Sqwertz wrote:

Too recent for ESDI

Looks like a standard old IDE 13 Gig 5400rpm hard drive. Very common
interface on computer motherboards until recently but most still retain
at least one such interface for the CDROM/DVD drive. Should be a no
brainer to attach the drive to most recent PCs. You'll need to open up
the PC as these interfaces weren't known to be connected to external
ports. Apart from a suitable ribbon cable, your average PC should be
able to accommodate the drive quite easily. The ribbon cables are
readily available and cheap these days. Your computer should have a
spare power supply connector internally as well.
In the past I have taken the side off the case, fitted the drive to an
unused connector on the motherboard and connected up the power to it.
Didn't even install the hard drive into the case, just left it sitting
on the benchtop. Only needed to get into the BIOS when booting to ensure
the PC was aware of the drive.

These days I use an external USB enabled caddy for such work. Saves
delving into PC cases.

Krypsis
 
In article ,
Cheryl wrote:



That seems very odd. I looked on my system and found the disk
management utility. It has an erase function with four levels of
security.

1. None. The data is all there, and just the directory is erased.
2. Quick. The entire disk is overwritten with zeroes.
3. 7. The entire disk is overwritten seven times. This satisfies some
DoD security requirement.
4. 35. The entire disk is overwritten thirty-five times.

--
Dan Abel
Petaluma, California USA
[email protected]
 
On Tue, 08 Feb 2011 08:22:05 -0800, Dan Abel wrote:


What disk management utility is it? Anything that provides DoD security wiping
has to be an after market add on, such as mine which encrypts the data to
military 128 and then wipes it... no one's reading that drive ;-)
or if really don't want people reading your old drives then beat the hell out
of them with a sludge hammer, new drives are sooo cheap to buy.
 
On Tue, 08 Feb 2011 11:07:35 -0600, Stu wrote:


Yeah, but so are new computers. Why put a new hard drive in an old
computer? That has never made sense to me.

--

Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its ground.
 
On Tue, 08 Feb 2011 10:50:05 -0800, sf wrote:


I always reuse my HD's, I wipe them and use them in rebuilt computers which
always end up donated to computers for kids. This organization makes sure
families living in poverty get a useable free computer for the kids to do
homework on. It's all volunteers, with hardware and software donated.
 
Krypsis wrote:

Chortle. The last time I touched an Extended Small Disk Interconnect
drive was on a MicroVAX in 1985. I thought the response was hilarious
because of the ancient acronym and the fact that the question did
include the interface.


I recently went to Frys and bought an SATA to USB converter cable for
about $25. If you can find a mounting box that has the correct IDE
pinout chances are its external interface has the denser pinout. Two
steps of conversion rather than one.
 
J. Clarke wrote:

There are several levels of DoD security ratings. The details of each
one are classified at the next level up so if you've held some level in
the past you aren't authorized to know the name of the next level.
Anyways, satisfying that DoD requirement is good enough for any data I
have ever put on any disk in a non-classifed environment. And most of
the classified work I did back in the day. So go for the 7 pass option.
I prefer using random data patterns not just zeros.


I have done that for disks coming out of classified environments back in
the day. Wear a breathing mask because it gets very dusty in that tiny
little closet with drills and sanders and grinders.
 
Stu wrote:

I do not trust the reformatting of old hard drives and it takes to long. I
use an old sledge hammer for my old hard drives.

--
Enjoy Life... Nad R (Garden in zone 5a Michigan)
 
Doug Freyburger wrote:

Choose DoD wipe that also removes the security tracks on the hard drive.
Reformatting a hard drive will not remove the that information. Also those
security tracks can have information about you, especially if you installed
tracking software on it in case computer was stolen.

The sledge hammer is my favorite way to reformat the hard drive.

--
Enjoy Life... Nad R (Garden in zone 5a Michigan)
 
On 2/8/2011 11:31 AM, Nad R wrote:

What the heck do you guys have on these drives?! The recipe for original
Coca-Cola? Super nasty ultra-porn? Snuff vids?? :-)

I have quite a collection of drives in my drawer. I try to recycle them
but some of them are unreliable and there's not too much use for drives
under 40GB or so in this world of Windows. OTOH, a 20GB drive would work
fine in a Linux machine. If I know that a drive is definitely dead, I'll
take it apart to salvage the magnets - I like magnets. If someone wants
to try to get data from the drive after that, I suppose they're welcome
to try. :-)
 
In article ,
Stu wrote:


It's called Disk Utility.app and came with my new Mac (in 2006).


I don't care about the info on my drive. I'll be lucky to remember to
delete the files at all. I was just surprised that Cheryl's computer
didn't come with a utility that wipes the drive a little more securely.

--
Dan Abel
Petaluma, California USA
[email protected]
 
On 2/8/2011 10:29 AM, Krypsis wrote:

I don't have any desktop PCs around, so that's why I bought an external
case. I know I could make it a slave if I had a PC.


Yup, that's what I'm trying to do. I'm just trying to find the right
external case because the one that "sounded" right by the description,
wasn't.
 
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