Desktop died (1 Viewer)

Hi all

My Dell hard-drive desktop died a death a week ago (got it in 2008)

So if I have not been on here this is the reason why

Now we have a laptop, and are thinking of having our old Dell hard-drive revamped for £150 - got a large capacity hard drive

Anyone had this done? Any hints or tips

Kathyx

Not clear on what you are intending to do? If you are wanting to repurpose the hard disk from your Dell to use as an external hard drive for your laptop then don't! A ten year old hard drive will be on its last legs. External hard drives can be had for about £35 per TB (less for no name Chinese ones). Your £150 will get you more brand new storage than you can possibly need.

Hi Mono

I plan to keep the Dell hard drive if it is worth it - if the power unit has not died and not the motherboard), and have a separate external hard drive to download the important files - and then keep the Dell as a PC to use for my Forum life etc...) and keep the laptop as the No 1 PC we have going for us.

I have only found out that Desktops are out of fashion now - due to the fact (most are bought as a cheap version of the original /Desktop we bought in 2008). We have so much information on our Dell hard drive (It is an Intel Core2 Inside) we need to keep it, and download information to an external hard-drive.

Anyone else in this same predicament at all?

Kx

Don't know if this is related to what you want to do but when my old laptop broke, my brother took out the hard drive and installed it into an external hard drive shell he bought at Walmart for a few dollars. It now can serve as an external hard drive and I have access to the files that were on my broken laptop.

Hello,

I faced a similar problem with my brother's laptop which failed in the middle of an important project. He did not backup in the middle of the project which was most unfortunate. To complicate matters, he did not have a startup disc included with the computer.

First step may be to extract the old hard drive and see if it is still functioning. The may require a shell which would have a SATA to USB 2 or 3 connexion. If the laptop computer recognizes the disc, you can guess that the motherboard failed. I am a Mac user so I am a little uncertain how to do this with a PC. You can then using the shell or housing with the old hard drive, as a backup or just an extra drive. You can also transfer the data from your old drive to the new laptop. I am uncertain of the procedures for a PC.

If the hard drive is dead, you need a startup disc, which may have been included with the computer. This used to be commonplace. Startup discs are commercially available, in the States, the cost was $30. Of course, you a hard drive disc , HDD, check with vendors for compatibility. There is no point in buying a solid state drive, SSD for a desktop, as its principal advantage of is saving battery capacity: not a problem with a desktop.

I am going to caution that using a startup disc may take hours, sometimes nothing seems to happen.

My brother eventually decided it was not worth the cost, about $100 and the time on his old laptop, as he now has a seven year old computer, whose usefulness may be limited.

Happy bird watching,
Arthur Pinewood :hi:

Peewit said:

Hi all

My Dell hard-drive desktop died a death a week ago (got it in 2008)

So if I have not been on here this is the reason why

Now we have a laptop, and are thinking of having our old Dell hard-drive revamped for £150 - got a large capacity hard drive

Anyone had this done? Any hints or tips

Kathyx

Click to expand...

Personally I wouldn't bother.

By the sound of how you're referring to it, I am guessing the hard drive itself is fine but something else in the computer broke.

If that's the case then I'd recommend buying a low-end Dell pre-built PC. I don't know if you have any tech-savvy family members, but it ought to be easy enough for them to connect up your old hard drive to a new computer, copy over what you want copying, then getting rid of the old hard drive(which, at 10 years old, is a liability on its own).

I dread to think how slow the computer must have been. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise

BamaMike said:

Personally I wouldn't bother.

By the sound of how you're referring to it, I am guessing the hard drive itself is fine but something else in the computer broke.

If that's the case then I'd recommend buying a low-end Dell pre-built PC. I don't know if you have any tech-savvy family members, but it ought to be easy enough for them to connect up your old hard drive to a new computer, copy over what you want copying, then getting rid of the old hard drive(which, at 10 years old, is a liability on its own).

I dread to think how slow the computer must have been. Maybe this is a blessing in disguise

Click to expand...

Why buy a cheap laptop when you can just buy an external hard drive case for a couple of dollars and put the hard drive from the broken laptop into it. The hard drive from my old laptop works just fine and it's well over 10 years old. Whenever I need to retrieve files from it I hook it up to my newer laptop via usb just like any external hard drive. Easy peasy.

emc said:

Why buy a cheap laptop when you can just buy an external hard drive case for a couple of dollars and put the hard drive from the broken laptop into it. The hard drive from my old laptop works just fine and it's well over 10 years old. Whenever I need to retrieve files from it I hook it up to my newer laptop via usb just like any external hard drive. Easy peasy.

Click to expand...

You're very fortunate to still have a functioning hard drive after 10 years, that's all I'm getting at.

Most mechanical drives fail before that and the cost of retrieving data, which may or may not be possible in its entirety, is a costly procedure that can be avoided by backing up on to a newer drive and retiring the older one.

It's happened to family members that have spent years researching genealogy only to have their work lost because of hard drive failure.

If you have anything sensitive on your hard drive you really don't want to lose, I'd recommend at least getting a few USB memory sticks and copying the files to those just in case.

I would buy a new external hard disc, don’t use the old one, technology has moved on. Using the old disc could compromise your new laptop.