netnomad’s blog & grill

This story began about four months ago. A friend of mine bought some bargain basement USB 3.5″ drive enclosures from a mail order house and discovered he didn’t need them. I’m guessing that shipping them back for a refund would have cost more than the refund so he gave them to me as a gift and I gratefully accepted. They sat on my shelf for a couple of months.

In October my father bought a new computer. He wanted to transfer data off the old one, so I thought to grab one of the enclosures. My plan was to remove the drive from the old computer, throw it in the enclosure, and copy the files off. Much to my shock, when I removed the drive from his old HP, I found it was a 5.25″ hard drive. While it wouldn’t fit in the enclosure, the connectors were the same and the backboard was detachable, so I attempted to hook the “guts” of the enclosure directly to the hard drive, ignoring the actual enclosure itself. The keyword being, I TRIED - with no success. I assumed because of the age of the hard drive I was unsuccessful. I ended up taking the hard drive to another friend and we got most of the data off of it. I’m still trying to convince myself I got all the viral infections out of the data.

Anyway.

As some of you know, I just bought a new computer myself. Rather than try to hook up the old IDE drives from my old Dell into the new Gateway machine, I decided to try the drive enclosure trick again thinking THIS TIME, it would surely work. After fifteen minutes of extracting the drive from the Dell (and remembering how to get the drive cage out), finding a jumper, and putting all the parts together, I spent the better part of an hour trying to get the thing to work - again with ZERO success. I went to the mail order site’s website only to discover that these units only had glowing customer reviews. I was upset. I called my friend and asked him if he’d ever attempted to use either of these enclosures before he gave them to me, in case he knew a trick I didn’t. “No. Maybe they’re toast”, came the reply and instantly the light bulb illuminated over my head as I hung up the phone.

I ripped the connectors off the back of the drive and threw them on a nearby table and reached for the second drive enclosure - the box I hadn’t ever touched. In about ten seconds I had the parts from the second one installed, and in even less time, I had it plugged into the USB port on the Gateway and turned on. It detected in about 2 seconds, and worked.

I’m sitting here thinking about the time I spent in Brockville, the time I spent at Matt’s house, and the time I spent here trying to get it to work. I feel like an idiot.

But hey. At least I have an extra set of cables.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 30th, 2006 at 10:03 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.