I am wanting to put my old hard drive in an external enclosure. How do I

[sweetonesissy]

know if its IDE or SATA? My old puter had a NTLDR missing error when it tried to boot up and ppl told me to do a recovery console restore but it was asking for a password that I never set up... So now I am trying to be able to save all of my important pics/resume and other stuff i'll die without. I'm kinda clueless here but am willing to try but when it comes to purchasing a HDD enclosure I'm not sure what I need. Also does anyone know if I'll have a problem once I swtich to an external drive? Will it still have the error and not let me access it? Any help would be great Thanks!

 

[It'sThatGuy]

IDE has a ribbon cable. SATA has a round cable, like a rope.

The easiest thing is to get a USB enclosure. You put your drive in it and plug it into a USB port and it shows up as another drive. But if you put your 'C' drive in an enclosure, I don't think you'll be able to use it to boot. Are you planning on buying a new 'C' (i.e the main drive) and use your old one as an external drive? If you -can- somehow boot from the old drive, then you will have the same problems.

 

[maeryk]

The connector. IDE will have a wide flat connector consisting of two rows of pins, 20 or 30, I think?

Sata uses a very small connector with like, four or five pins, that looks like a mini-usb connector, and a small cable, as opposed to IDE's wide ribbon cable.