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.

I have two external hard drives, both Western Digital. One has its own power source; the other is powered by USB. Both are 1 TB and I have never had a problem. Pooh Bear ==================== This was sent to me thru one of my Yahoo groups: As I have been going through my archived data discs I have been coming across several of them that have become bad over the years and thus I cannot get anything off of them. There are photos and videos that were on some of them that I cannot replace:-( So, I made an account at an online file storage site to save my precious files to the cloud to help save from disc deterioration. As I was looking around to see what my options were for storing my sensitive data I came across this site and found it interesting. The discs are pricey (about ~$3 a disc) but they are known as the '1000 year disc.' It takes a special burner to burn them. The DVD Burner is like $40 at Best Buy so you can probably find it even cheaper somewhere else if you shop around. Not sure if there are any retail sellers for the M-Discs though. I didn't dig too deep trying to find anything. Check out the site because it is interesting. They say it is like burning the data into a rock, lol! Anyway, I found this a while back and thought I would share it with you real quick while I had the time:-) M-DISC, Write Once and Read Forever. You might feel like you're making a "permanent" backup of your files when you copy them onto a DVD or backup to a computer hard-drive, but the truth is these devices suffer from natural decay and degradation. Current DVD technology uses organic dyes and low laser power to make marks on the data layer of a standard recordable DVD. Over time, these marks become unreadable because organic dyes degrade when exposed to minimal levels of light, heat, and humidity. This means all the data you thought was safely stored could be lost because the discs you used have an average lifespan of only about 3 to 5 years! Why would you risk your data based on an average; hundreds of discs taken into account in that average were corrupt and unreadable after only a few months. With Millenniata, we don't subject you to the possibility of losing your data. When we say "Write Once and Read Forever", we mean it. Here is a link that might be useful: http://millenniata.com/m-disc/

I use a Western Digital 80 Gb, external hard drive w/ USB2 conection. This drive has its own power source and does not swamp the USB port. (Most USB ports are protected from shorting. If a device pulls too much current from the port, it shuts down and a re-boot is required to get the port running again. I have a 120 Gb Passport drive for my laptop and the inrush of the drive motor will shut down the port. A "Y" connector is required so that the disc drive can pull power from 2 ports.) To back up my importnt data files, I do not use a "backup" utility that uses data compression and put a group of files into a file set. This harks back to tape drives and limited storge space. I simply copy my important data files using the same folder (directory) structure as on the parent drive. Now, the back up copies are readily available by a simple drag and drop operation. For example, you may have financial data that changes daily. Its simple matter to periodically write copies of the current files to the back up space.

I think that the type of file that was made for the backup may be critical for scanning success. If the file was an "image" of the original computer, then it probably can be scanned for malware and viruses. However. removing such items changes the file and it may no longer be an image of the original and can not be used to transfer the operating system to a new computer. An unadulterated image file is required for moving an operating system and its installed applications. If the the backup is merely a collection of copies of data files, then scan the external hard drive to rid it of baddies before copying these file to the new computer. When backing up data files, often backup software does not just make copies of the data, but creates a large data base containing compressed files of the data files. I'm not sure if this type of file can be scanned for viruses. Carefully read the capabilities of the scanner software. Some may say they have the ability to scan compressed files, but this may mean only files that are individually compressed and not a batch of files that have been collected into a single compressed (backup) file.