... with hard drives full of stuff I wanted to keep. The tricky thing about doing this is that old PCs with their RS232 serial ports, internal IDE drive connectors, and total lack of USB ports are not very connectable to modern PCs (with their lack of RS232 ports and their SATA internal drive connectors).
One old PC was working just fine, though 10 years old so very slow & limited. With the help of a USB add-on card (bought for other reasons a while ago) & a 2Gb flash drive I transfered the entire contents onto the hard drive on my new PC.
The second old PC was a lot more tricky because it has a totally broken, kaput, non-functioning, dead motherboard after suffering from a severe case of IBM PC leaky capacitor syndrome a few years ago. I didn’t know whether its drive was still ok but wanted to check it out. I managed that with the help of an external IDE hard drive cradle (borrowed from work). That little device was a wonderful thing. I just removed the old hard drive from the broken PC, plugged it into the cradle, plugged the cradle into my new PC via USB and (Awesome!!) I could use that old hard drive just as though it was internal to my new PC.
That old drive was completely intact and it was great seeing all the things I thought I’d lost when the motherboard went down – old pics, emails, music, and lots more. It all transfered over like a dream.
And all of this has hardly made a difference to the free space available on my new PCs hard drive. It put me in mind of a phrase my father used to use… “Like a spit in the ocean”!!
