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Connecting a hard drive externally via USB

17 years ago

I have an EIDE hard drive sitting here that I need to connect

to a computer and copy the owner's stuff off of it.

Is the item linked below what I need.

I'm also thinking this item would be good if I ever needed

to hook up a SATA drive externally. But for now just EIDE.

It just says IDE in the description, not EIDE.

I want to be sure before I buy it.

Thanks.

Pooh Bear

Here is a link that might be useful: SATA / IDE external hard drive hook up

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Comments (14)

marooma
17 years ago
Pooh Bear,

Yep, it will work. EIDE is basically a trademark term patented by Western Digital. The generic term is IDE and the extra E in front stands for Enhanced. I have the same item I bought at Tigerdirect. One good thing about is the adapter will fit SATA, IDE and the small connectors in laptop harddrives. HTH.

Terry
daylilydayzed
17 years ago
Pooh bear I don't mean to hijack your post but I have one of those cables and I need to know in what order the things are hooked up and powered up. Mine did not come with an instruction manual or a CD with drivers. In a few weeks I will be getting a hard drive enclosure and I need to transfer things to a new hard drive before I put the drive in the enclosure. I am giving the drive away to a friend who had her computer's hard drive fail. She currently has a very small drive(only 20 GB since someone helped her by building a new computer with parts he had on hand). I am donating my 80GB drive so she can have more room for her things she does using pictures and flowers. Any help from you or Terry would be appreciated greatly.
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owbist
17 years ago
Daylily I would personally hook everything up except connecting to the USB port on the computer. Once it is all in place then plug the USB port in and the computer should recognise the new hard drive.
marooma
17 years ago
Daylily,

Yep, what Owbist says is in the manual. Hook everything up, except the USB, power up the drive, and plug-in the USB. By the way, the drivers on the CD are only required for Windows 98SE/ME. XP and above already has them built-in. HTH.

Terry
daylilydayzed
17 years ago
Thank you both Owbist and Terry. I was hoping it would be that simple. I also contacted the Sabrent company about it and got some great help from them concerning the new drive being assigned a drive letter. I had not done that yet.
daylilydayzed
17 years ago
I have got the 300 GB drive formatted and now it shows up when I click My Computer. It was given the drive letter G. E is taken by the external drive I have and F is given to my internal media card reader since it has a USB port on it. Now all I have to do is install Windows XP Professional on it and transfer all my things to it .
Pooh Bear
Original Author
17 years ago
Thanks everybody.
Should be interesting to be able to use an external hard drive.

Pooh Bear
daylilydayzed
17 years ago
I had my old drive that was in my original HP Pavilion computer. I was told that the drive had crashed about 2 years after I had gotten the computer. Well I just put the drive aside and forgot about it until recently. I hooked it up to the Sabrent 5 in 1 Cable to Serial ATA transfer thing and hooked everything to the drive and then plugged it in to the USB port on the tower of my home built computer. It was recognized and I was able to reformat it. Now I just need to get a new hard drive enclosure.Thanks to Owbist and Terry I was able to do it without having to call my son and bother him with a lot of questions.
genes
17 years ago
Daylily: you could also use a program like Acronis True Image and copy your full (old HDD and transfer to new HDD).
I would do a major cleanup before hand ie: get rid of old files, programs etc before doing it so you dont transfer a bunch of unneeded stuff
daylilydayzed
17 years ago
Thanks Gene! I will do that.
fruitjarfla
17 years ago
Although my memory is fragile, I think this was a posting from owbist: Check to see if the external drive manufacturer also furnishes a good backup program to accompany the drive. I have a Seagate and an old version of Acronis True Image that wouldn't work and was no longer supported. As suggested, checked the Seagate site and yep, found it - a free current version of Acronis. Does what is supposed to do.
ravencajun Zone 8b TX
17 years ago
and if you need a free imaging program this one is available
DriveImage XML
daylilydayzed
17 years ago
RavenCajun,
I am so glad that you provided that link to DriveImageXL. I will be ordering the new hard drive this weekend and that program will help me immensely.
owbist
17 years ago
Seagate and Maxtor provide backup software on new hard drives - or you can download either assuming you have the relevant make of drive.

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