Can you get an External SATA Drive case?

[Aprisa]

Ok so I'm nearly back together with my PC, I had backed up nearly everything except my emails! whenever I try and log on to the old SATA drive that I have connected to the PC it re-boots the machine.
I used to have an external HDD case that connected via the serial port for my old PC, question is - is there the same kind of thing for SATA drives and if so would it be likely that I could read some of the old info via this method?

If all else fails, does anyone know of a way to recover data from a dodgy drive?

Cheers
Nick

[Plotloss]

You can get SATA to USB converters and SATA to IDE converters

Theres almost certaintly a solution out there.

[bigdods]

So with your replacement SATA drive installed and happily running, if you add the old drive as a second SATA device in the machine it reboots ? Never seen that before but its possibly a catastrophic drive failure causing some kind of short. I guess *scratches head*

Not sure if sticking the drive in an external bay will work if its toasted already. Does the drive spin up when power is applied ? You can check by removing the data cable but leaving the power cable attached then switch the PC on. If it does spin up then all is not lost....

[Aprisa]

The drive boots OK and the root is visible in explorer, I have managed to copy over a few files but very quickly get a write error and the machine re-boots. I guess I'm hoping that if the connection is less direct (ie via a USB) then it will prevent the re-boot?

Nick

[neil_cardiff]

Aprisa said:

The drive boots OK and the root is visible in explorer, I have managed to copy over a few files but very quickly get a write error and the machine re-boots. I guess I'm hoping that if the connection is less direct (ie via a USB) then it will prevent the re-boot? Nick

I'd say that the drive is shagged to be honest. Drives do tend to go every so often, and no matter how you connect it, it'll still throw an error depending on where the fault is on the disc...

At the very least it could be a driver issue, but I'd go with shagged...

[pdV6]

Aprisa said:

I have managed to copy over a few files but very quickly get a write error and the machine re-boots

But what are you writing to that drive?
Is Windows trying to use a paging file on there?

[Aprisa]

pdV6 said:

Aprisa said: I have managed to copy over a few files but very quickly get a write error and the machine re-boots But what are you writing to that drive? Is Windows trying to use a paging file on there?

I've really no idea, I'm only trying to see my email files and a couple of other things, not trying to add to it! I would tell you the exact error but at the present I have disconnected it pending fixes.