I have a 20 year old HDD taken from an old Dell machine running windows 3.0; naturally, the old machine was ripped apart and is now part of a pile in the city dump. I'm looking for creative ways to copy these data files (I have no idea what's in there, probably old college papers, txt logs from my early internet days....fun stuff) using an enclosure, windows 7 and a dream.

I searched and it's rare to find even the topic, but generally the idea is to get a legacy machine, stick it in there and grab the data. It's too cold to go to a garage sale, most of these old machines have no CD burner/ just an old floppy and the stuff isn't time sensitive enough at the moment to justify a data recovery place. Can anyone plot out a recipe that can get me into this baby?

Right now in disk recovery, it wants me to initialize the disk. Perhaps it can be done in a non destructive way?

Thanks for the help guys!

Nik

"Initialisation" is data destructive. Please don't do it.

Can you show us the contents of sector 0? You could use a disc editor (eg DMDE freeware) in readonly mode.

http://dmde.com/

Can you tell us the model number of your drive?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

If you add the drive in a computer and ignore all windows messages, partition find and mount can often create an image of the drive anyway. Ignoring messages means dont even click ok or cancel, just ignore and try PFaM.