I have a very specific question that might be gibberish so apologies but hopefully someone can make sense of this.
Been asked about data recovery by a friend on an old external drive. I’ve not gotten it yet but from what they described it seems like an issue with the connectors and now it doesn’t seem to power. From a quick google I think it’s what I believe is called the ‘sata bridge connector’.
So just to clarify are these old external hdd just regular drives enclosed with the sata bridge connector as a built in adapter ? Could I not remove the casing and plug it directly into my pc and recover the data? From the youtube vid I caught the bloke used an adapter in place of the bridge but I’d imagine I could just hook it up directly into a pc like a normal drive no ?
If anyone has any imput I would really appreciate it. I am the local person who knows a bit about computers and you guys have always been the peope who know a lot more than me haha! cheers
Yes, external drive enclosures are normally populated with regular internal HDDs (or in more modern times, SSDs). So you should be able to remove the drive and connect it to your PC, provided it has a usable interface. Depending on age, there’s a chance you’d be looking at an IDE drive and modern PC hardware doesn’t support that anymore.
Even so, I’d be extremely cautious about connecting an unknown drive to a PC, especially if you don’t know what’s on it. Assuming you’d be able to connect to the drive, I’d recommend disconnecting your own drives (all of them!) and boot the system with a Linux LiveCD. That way, if there’s anything malicious on the drive, it can’t touch your data, nor infect your system with malware/root kits/keyloggers/etc. There’s a few Linux livecd’s out there, including (but not limited to) Kali, Knoppix and Sysrescuecd. For your knowledge level I’d recommend Knoppix. Scan the drive for malware before copying the contents to a separate drive. From there. reformat the original drive and copy the data back, so you can return it to the owner(s).
I would just look out for the smaller form factor external drives, as some of them don’t have a SATA interface, but most of the large from factor ones do (at the moment)
