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[Ashley Wagner]

Yay Al! Glad you got a good computer and a great deal!

[El Guru (Al)]

Okay so the old system finally kicked the bucket won't even boot now or even let me into BIOS. Anyway I had pulled out my 160 GB HD I had used for data as I discovered I am missing a chunk of my music.  I was going to pop the hard drive into the new computer I bought.  I opened up the case to discover that not only it is going to be a major pain to add the hard drive has HP mounts them inside a cage inside the system but this system doesn't have IDE connections.  I suppose I can go get an IDE controller card so that I can connected the hard drive.  But I wonder if there is another option such as making it external.  I thought I had seen somewhere on this here forum something about that.  I also noticed this computer doesn't have serial or parallel ports or even a floppy drive.  Never thought I see the day where I would have a system that didn't have a floppy drive. Any way I have 3 hard drives 30, 120 and 160 GB which are basically just collecting dust at the moment.  Suggestions?

[OldManDeath]

I am sure that it has USB 2.0 ports being a new computer.  What I did was bought an external USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure for 2 drives that I have and use them that way.  One I use as a backup drive for my multimedia files.  The other is a drive that I have a lot of other files on.

The ones I have and really recommend are the Vantec NexStar 3 enclosures as they are not too big, are made of aluminum and work without a hitch. 
Website:  http://www.vantecusa.com/product.html

[El Guru (Al)]

I am sure that it has USB 2.0 ports being a new computer.  What I did was bought an external USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure for 2 drives that I have and use them that way.  One I use as a backup drive for my multimedia files.  The other is a drive that I have a lot of other files on.

The ones I have and really recommend are the Vantec NexStar 3 enclosures as they are not too big, are made of aluminum and work without a hitch. 
Website:  http://www.vantecusa.com/product.html

Looks like they sell them at Fry's Electronics.  Do you know if these work with Windows Vista?

[OldManDeath]

I am sure that it has USB 2.0 ports being a new computer.  What I did was bought an external USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure for 2 drives that I have and use them that way.  One I use as a backup drive for my multimedia files.  The other is a drive that I have a lot of other files on.

The ones I have and really recommend are the Vantec NexStar 3 enclosures as they are not too big, are made of aluminum and work without a hitch. 
Website:  http://www.vantecusa.com/product.html

Looks like they sell them at Fry's Electronics.  Do you know if these work with Windows Vista?

That is where I bought mine, Fry's Electronics.  Yes, they work on Vista as I use them on my Vista Ultimate and hooked them up to my Vista Home Premium (Notebook).  There is no software involved with them at all, they are just enclosures that use electronics to pass the information back and forth across the USB/IDE interfaces.

[spock1982 (Ernie)]

An external enclosure is defiantly the way to go. You will get good performance on USB 2 and it is easy to install your dive in the enclosure.

[Ryan Wagner]

I'm guessing all of the drives in the computer are SATA then, and that is one of the problems I had at one point. What I did was purchase a SATA to IDE connector so that I could install the drive within the computer. Yeah, those connectors are a pain and the but to get working with both Vista and XP, so I highly recommend the external enclosure...which I also have.

[spock1982 (Ernie)]

I have noticed that a lot of new mother boards come with either one IDE channel or even NO IDE!! This is a pain for people with DVD and CD ROM's or even large HDD that you don't want to replace just yet.

[El Guru (Al)]

Further there is not much room to work inside this case.  I would have to disconnected a bunch of stuff just to get to the had drive.

[spock1982 (Ernie)]

Further there is not much room to work inside this case.  I would have to disconnected a bunch of stuff just to get to the had drive.

Just takes a little bump to cause a problem in a tight space like that.

[Ryan Wagner]

I hate small computer cases...you open the things up and you can hardly see the motherboard because of all the cables crammed in such a small area.

[El Guru (Al)]

Nothing is ever simple!  I went to Fry's Electronics on Saturday and got a hard drive enclosure.  Got home took a long nap and then went to set it up that evening only to discover I purchased SATA instead of IDE .  By that time the last bus that comes thru Chandler had already come and I did not feel like biking all the way out there.  So this morning I got up early and took the SATA enclosure back and made sure this time I had IDE.  I wasn't able to find the Vantec ones so I picked up a Coolmax.  I get it opened up and installed no problems.  I connected it to my machine and boot-up and Vista is not picking it up.  I go to their website thinking I might need to download a driver, but it says for Vista no driver is needed.  So I am reading their FAQs and I see something about Jumper settings.  This drive use to be a slave and according to the FAQs I need to have it set as master.  Since I have no idea what happened to the jumpers that came with those two drives OMD gave me, I knew there was one on the old master in the old system  Of course that system is out in storage buried under a bunch of other stuff.  After a few minutes I was finally able to get to the old hard drive and get the jumper off it.  When it was all said and done with the jumper in place Vista picked up both drives (partitions) right away!  Now I can get the missing files I needed off this drive.

[Ryan Wagner]

If computers were simple who would need IT people? Glad you ended up getting the drive to work though. I've run into similar issues with jumpers before, which is why I have a nice little stash of extra jumpers laying around just in case I need them.

[OldManDeath]

If computers were simple who would need IT people? Glad you ended up getting the drive to work though. I've run into similar issues with jumpers before, which is why I have a nice little stash of extra jumpers laying around just in case I need them.

I too have a stash of jumpers sitting around.  However, once IDE drives are gone in favor of SATA, the jumpers will be a relic item to hang onto for nostalgia.

@Al - I do not remember if I had jumpers on those.  I believe without jumpers, they defaulted to "Cable-Select".   But at least you got it working.

[Ryan Wagner]

However, once IDE drives are gone in favor of SATA, the jumpers will be a relic item to hang onto for nostalgia.

They can still be used on some motherboards for things such as overclocking. I think jumpers will always have some use in the world of electronics.