Re: Moving a hard drive to a USB device

Joe Gill wrote:
> 
> I have a dead (bad motherboard and other problems) PC. It was Windows
> XP2 Home The hard drive is in great shape.
> 
> What I am planning to do is get one of the external HD enclosures
> with a USB cable. Any 'gotchas'?

BTDT.  I haven't run into any gotchas.

> Now come the questions:
> 1) Can I read this with any other Windows XP PC. I realize that the
> PC can read the hard drive. I am concerned some sort of Windows
> security won't let me read the drive in the other PC True/False/
> Comments...

Worst case, get a copy of BartPE.  Your main drive will still appear
as C:, and the external USB will probably be D:.  You can then copy
the entire USB to drive C:.

Assuming the USB is D: and the main is C:, you can drop to a command
shell and run:

    mkdir c:\olddisk
    xcopy d:\*.* c:\olddisk /s /e /y /c /h /k /r

("xcopy /?" will explain each of the flags.)

I have only run into one problem with the above xcopy command.  Some
systems have so many files in the IE cache, that xcopy will give an
"out of memory" error when it gets there.  To get around this, go
into
each users cache ("\documents and settings\USERNAME\local settings\
temporary internet files\content.ie5") and delete everything there.

You might want to clear the "...\local settings\temp" directory for
each user as well.

> 2) Since what is wanted is to get data off the PC (pictures,
> documents, etc.) We may also want to plug it into a MAC notebook.
>     1) Will the MAC be able to read the drive as is?
>     2) Can I just copy files over to the MAC and use the MAC
> programs on them (i.e.: WORD documents, JPG files,)

It's been too many years since I've done anything significant on a
Mac to answer these.  Though every computer here does have a MAC
address. :-)

-- 
+-------------------------+--------------------+-----------------------+
| Kenneth J. Brody        | www.hvcomputer.com | #include              |
| kenbrody/at\spamcop.net | www.fptech.com     |    <std_disclaimer.h> |
+-------------------------+--------------------+-----------------------+
Don't e-mail me at: <mailto:ThisIsASpamTrap@gmail.com>

Kenneth Brody wrote:
> Joe Gill wrote:
> 
>> 2) Since what is wanted is to get data off the PC (pictures,
>> documents, etc.) We may also want to plug it into a MAC notebook.
>>     1) Will the MAC be able to read the drive as is?
>>     2) Can I just copy files over to the MAC and use the MAC
>> programs on them (i.e.: WORD documents, JPG files,)
> 
> It's been too many years since I've done anything significant on a
> Mac to answer these.  Though every computer here does have a MAC
> address. :-)

I'd be surprised if a Mac couldn't read a USB drive.  Linux, Unix, etc, 
seems to have pretty good support for lots of file systems.  I assume 
the Mac (being Unix based) will act much like Linux in that respect. 
Linux handles FAT32 (VFAT) without a problem.  NTFS is labeled as 
experimental support, at least the write part of read/write, but I've 
never run into any problems.  However, if the filesystem is encrypted, 
well, then you might have a problem.

As to the files themselves, if they are open formats (jpg, html, txt, 
etc), you should be able to use them just fine.  If they are Microsoft 
format, well, your millage might vary.  Most times they can be read but