Old drive pulled from Dell

[zacster]

I just pulled the hard drive from my old Dell computer, which I dropped off at the electronics recycling. It is a 9gb Maxtor IDE/ATA drive. I'm not looking to use the drive, but I want to see what is on it. The old dell had been water damaged and I didn't even try to boot it up.

Will I be able to use it on my iMac with the Newer Technologies all in one disk adapter? I just want to see what's on it, there may be some photos and videos of my kids. I also have the old internal drive from the iMac that would be a good drive as long as it works. It died, then started working again the day I went to install the SSD that I use now.

 

[pigoo3]

Will I be able to use it on my iMac with the Newer Technologies all in one disk adapter? I just want to see what's on it, there may be some photos and videos of my kids.

When you say "use it"...do you mean:

- see what's on it from the old Dell computer?
- or use the 9gig HD for Mac related purposes?

The best way I can think of is install this old 9gig HD (from your dead Dell)...into an external HD housing. This "housing" will most likely be USB...so you don't need that "disk adapter"...you just plug the USB cable into your iMac's USB port.

I'm not 100% sure how much on that old Dell drive your Mac is going to be able to "see"...but if you wanted to use this old HD as a storage drive or a backup drive for your iMac (it is pretty small by today's standards)...you would reformat it with Disk Utility...and you're good to go.

- Nick

 

[zacster]

The "disk adapter" is in lieu of a housing, just a multi plug cable with a USB 3 at the other end, and a lot cheaper I just want to plug it in not make it part of an equipment rack. Not looking to use it either, just read it and grab anything that is of interest off it onto another drive. After that, I'd use the cable for my 240gb original iMac drive, although I've got plenty of room left on my 2 500gb external drives, one FW, the other USB and don't really need it at the moment.

 

[RavingMac]

The "disk adapter" is in lieu of a housing, just a multi plug cable with a USB 3 at the other end, and a lot cheaper I just want to plug it in not make it part of an equipment rack. Not looking to use it either, just read it and grab anything that is of interest off it onto another drive. After that, I'd use the cable for my 240gb original iMac drive, although I've got plenty of room left on my 2 500gb external drives, one FW, the other USB and don't really need it at the moment.

Let us know how it works out.

I bought one of those adapter cables last year intending to do exactly the same thing, check content on some old HDs I have laying around, but I never got around to doing it.