Hard Disk Caddy

[DiddlyQuaQua]

I have a couple of hard disks lying about from previous crashes I was never able to recover. Some photos, mp3s and e-mails I'd like to have back are on those old disks.

Ive been told that to recover the data I could simply buy a hard disk caddy from Maplins for about �30 and plug it into my laptop and it would be recognised as an external hard drive. Is that all there is to it?
The old hard disks were Windows 98 the laptop is Vista.

[fo3nix]

Yes, potentially.

But how have the old disks crashed? The files may not be recoverable.

You can google for free file recovery programs; one of these may help.

[Palustris]

THis happened to me I bought an Icy Box and followed the instructions which came with it. The computer still could not read the old drive as the FAT was damaged. However I downloaded a program from the GNU people and it worked a treat.
There are other Recovery progs out there, but as far as I could see all of them were trial versions which did nothing until you paid for them.
TestDisk is the prog I used.

[DiddlyQuaQua]

Thanks for your time.

The hard disk didn't so much crash as the pc would only start in safe mode ...and I didn't have the knowledge to get it to go further. As it was a very old, slow low spec machine I abandoned it ... but I would like to retrieve some of the files.

[fo3nix]

Then yes you should be fine.

To note: there are different type of hard drive connections. Modern ones will often be SATA.

Check the type of your old drive (have a look and see what it says... IDE, ATA, something like that). Then go and find a caddy for that drive type to USB.