• Hey Guest!
    British Car Forum has been supporting enthusiasts for over 25 years by providing a great place to share our love for British cars. You can support our efforts by upgrading your membership for less than the dues of most car clubs. There are some perks with a member upgrade!
    **Upgrade Now**
    (PS: Upgraded members don't see this banner, nor will you see the Google ads that appear on the site.)
Tips
Tips

Old WD Hard Drives

Share this page

PAUL161

PAUL161

Great Pumpkin
Silver
Country flag
Offline
I have a pair of old hard drives that came out of a tower computer I junked about 5 years ago. Their the old big drives. I bought a converter to see what was on them and wanted to wipe them before trashing them. Problem is, my computers won't recognize them through the USB port. Only option I figure I have is to dismantle them and destroy the discs. There might be some missing photos on them though I wouldn't want to loose, any clues how to get into them? PJ
 
Paul - there are many data recovery services. You send the HD to them, they copy any HD files to CD and send both the HD and CD back to you.

One example: Kroll Ontrack.

Tom M.
 
do you have access to a computer with a conventional plug? Hard drive cases are cheap and interchangeable - Or, alternately is there software out there that might be purpose made for recognizing old formats.
 
I had the same problem, I solved it with a Maxtor external drive case. Plugs in with 1394 connection cables. You probably can pick one up
from Clist. Or you can have mine, I lost the cables, so you would have to come up with those.
Tom S
 
Tom, Thanks for the offer, but I have two external drive cases the drives will fit into. I think it'd a W-10 problem not recognizing old drives. But, the Linux mint machine doesn't recognize them either. Could possibly be in the BIOs settings for W-10. I have an older W-7 machine which I'll check them on.
Thanks all for the feed back, much appreciated. PJ
 
You may also need to see if you can download drivers for them, could be the current ones you have don't include the information to recognize them.
 
We've had some success with opening up a current compute and then hooking up the old hard drive to the new computer using the same ribbon connectors. Definitely easier in a computer that already has multiple hard drives or has the facility for multiple hard drives as opposed to pulling the existing drive from the computer.
 
Back
Top