Old hard drive exploration extravaganza (now what?)

[Succy Beverage]

Hey guys, I got something a little special in my life this time around

a couple years back, i picked up a bunch of old computers from a estate sale nearby me, a whole bunch of old tech from mostly the turn of the millenium and such. Most of them were old (probably broken) pc's but I got bunch of old pc-parts and even a couple of old servers with them!
 

Unfortunately I don't have the time, space, or really the patience to give the machines the time they truly deserve, restoring them and such, and my interests are in software than hardware. Besides most of the machines were clearly damaged in some way that makes me wonder if turning them on would cause an eletrical fire (really, one of them had a sandpaper sponge taped over the back fan. who does that?). But I did want to take at least something from all of these machines.

  so I took their brains!

Right now i got about a dozen 40-100 gb hard drives from the early 2000's which has god knows what on them, I got a ribbon cable to use on each of them but I'm fairly uneducated on how to properly explore these without having to constantly install, and then uninstall, and then reinstall, a bunch of old hard drives onto a burner laptop. Most of these probably have the O.S.'s still on them so I'd hate to lose that if I opened these like a flash drive.

Any idea what to do here? There was also this old macintosh with the junk that I kept if anyone is interested about that instead :/ .
 
operation  "old world blues" is a go!


>edit 4/15/2024

Btw, I'll be posting any notable information I can rack from these drives, most of it is probably going to be just some form of boring business files but it still should be fun to find out!

[Memory]

A dozen... well, that sounds like a big archivist's mission, so it requires some true archivist's equipment. Or do you want to fiddle around with those connectors inside your computer case one by one? Too big of a hassle!

I'd recommend an external hard disk docking station for your task. Check it for being capable of taking in IDE drives (like what you have there at the top left corner of your box with the long, flat connectors).

The old IDE stuff was being superseeded by SATA at around 2004. You have to deal with jumper pins from the stoneage if you want to use two IDE devices (hard disk and CD drive for example) next to each other. But there should be instructions printed on the drive itself that show, how to jumper it as "Master" or "Slave".

Good luck!

[Succy Beverage]

Update: stupid stupid stupid

I found a docker online that i hoped would work, only to find that the thing doesn't have the right pins upon it!

How silly of me to get it, but hopefully this next docker will be right for it. Full IDE support with additional 4 pin power.

I guess it's applicable that I don't plug in completely unknown hard drives into my personal pc. So i hope this old burner laptop can handle data thats... 10 years old than it is.
 
Also I know that some of the drives are dvd/floppy disk drives, who doesn't need an old dvd/floppy disk drive?

to which... anyone know where to find some dvds/floppy discs?


 



Oh @!*# right! I also had a couple old server towers from the same time I could look into, probably should take any more sweet juicy hard drives I can find!