HardDrive to USB

SATA/ IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter
 
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You realize of course, that external enclosure aren't exactly front page news, not have they been for more than a decade?

The trouble here is, you can buy high capacity external drives for only a few dollars more, (and on sale, sometimes less), than a comparable capacity internal drive..

Depending on what type of data you're trying to archive, older low capacity drives, say 100 GB to 250 GB, are next to worthless for home theater, music, or photography applications. I have them all over the house.

Brand new 2 TB Seagate standard home HDDs, are frequently on sale for as low as $50.00.

I'm still amused and bemused, about your penchant & motivations for starting threads as questions, which you then provide the answers.

FWIW, USB flash drives are now available in 256 GB models, for the same money as an external enclosure. At steeper prices, you can buy thumb drives up to 1 TB.

Since USB 3/0 is reasonably fast, with the convenience of plug and play, I'm not sure that resurrecting older low capacity HDDs is a worthwhile pursuit, particularly PATA drives. In fact I"m not entirely sure today's mobos even provide a PATA buss..
 
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Ok, to be brief, my desktop died, no $$ to find out why so I want to turn the harddrive into a USB drive to access what is on the harddrive if possible, hopefully I can for less $$$ :)
 
Ok, to be brief, my desktop died, no $$ to find out why so I want to turn the harddrive into a USB drive to access what is on the harddrive if possible, hopefully I can for less $$$ :)
What exactly do you mean "died"? What isn't it doing? Does it only have the single hard drive? What are you intending to plug the drive into once you put it in an enclosure? Not the same machine, I hope. The boot menu / order would have to be changed. If that were to work, all it would prove is that one SATA port was bad. (OR one PATA port on a very old machine.

Assuming several worst case scenarios, of which one or all could be present:
1: The drive itself id bad, and data recovery could run into hundreds of dollars.

2: The drive could be infected and trash the machine you plug it into.

3: older PSUs are a likely failure point. Sometimes they take out the motherboard (ala older PSUs in early eMachines), sometimes they don't It depends on the protection built into the PSU. Higher quality PSUs have better protection strategies.

$: unplug the HDD(s) altogether. The machine should boot to BIOS sand stay there

If this is a pre-built machine, BIOS access is limited, as the major settings lock out the user with a factory password. One function of which can be to "tattoo" the copy of Windows to the mobo, so that it can never be used again.
 
By "DIED", I mean I had had it on for a while, sitting on a piece of wood on carpet running with a screensver on, I decided to relocate it so I tapped the space bar to shut it down,(Meaning to use mouse to click start>shut down) that did nothing ( screensaver kept going), moved the mouse, same thing. Thats when I noticed the power on button light was not on. The 2 green lights one inside & one on the back side was still on. I know pc had heat issues during summer, but ok in cooler weather.

Screensaver running but pc not? Strange. Single drive I'm guessing. I'm not the techie tech you others are:)
I'm hoping to plug it into a different pc/laptop to access music & such.
I seriously doubt the harddrive is infected, Broni is a good teacher, I scan to kill time :)
 
For diagnostic purposes I would have suspected the mouse or keyboard first.

Dunno if that's the issue, but's that what I would have eliminated first, before proclaiming.it "dead". As I understand your explanation,. you tapped the space bar, which should have lit up the desktop screen, instead of the screen saver..

Nero had a primordial erupting volcano screensaver, which used over 50" of the CPU's power to animate. Nowadays, all my PC's screens are simply set to go dead after a specific time

What happens if you press and hold the power button. That should kill the machine completely.

Sometimes turning the power off at the PSU, then holding the desktop's power button until any residual chartge is removed from the system's capacitors can work wonders.
 
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