How to access a hard drive from a dead computer.

Author: TwinBytes Inc
647558 View
5m 41s Lenght
1200 Rating

Computer trick, trade secret is revealed here. It's so easy yet most people don't know about it. If your computer crashes, whether laptop or desktop, MAC or Windows, you can access the data from the hard drive using another computer. I show you how in this short video. Most cases it's not a data recovery you need and you can do this yourself at home. If you want to buy these cables, you can find them at http://www.twinbytes.ca/computer_store.htm click the image to see the full store and type in the search "SATA to USB" or "IDE to USB", depending on what you have.

Comments

  1. can't this be dangerous, if the HDD/SSD is dripping with viruses, or will those virii be in an inert state? this question is to clear up whether or not to do this from a VM.
  2. Only 40.6 Gb in the local disk drive that's so shit mine had 921 gb but then it broke so I upgraded to a ssd 500 Gb btw that's an upgrade because it's an ssd
  3. Thank you! I was freaking out about my sons baby pictures :/
  4. Thanks for this! While I was watching I realised that my external hard drive, a Seagate GoFlex that I use for backing up, has a connection block on the end of it with the mini-USB socket on one side and the ribbon socket for the drive on the other. I'd pulled it out before now and thought it was a curious thing to make it that way. I wondered if I could take my dead laptop's drive out and just plug it into this instead of the external drive's black box - yes you can, and it just powers itself directly from the USB of the computer used to read it. So if anyone's reading this with a non-booting SATA drive (laptop kind), and you have an external drive, check if it has a removable section where the mini USB plugs in - or if you know someone with one - the other side of it might be just what you need to plug your dead drive into, without having to buy a kit.

    I was sick to the stomach when my Win7 stopped booting yesterday. Someone gave me it, and I'd not made a rescue disk, nor had they given me the original OS disk, nor had I backed up for months. It was great to find that I can just copy the data over and/or stick some in the cloud before deciding whether to try and recover the OS (probably something for a professional). The host machine I'm using to read the drive has Linux Mint, and it reads the data just fine, apparently without any problems of permissions set on the original drive.
  5. thank you so much for sharing this info.l I will do it.
  6. Will it be a problem if the older hard drive uses a different version of windows?
  7. what to you mean by dead computer? if a computer is dead this means the hdd is dead and if the hdd is dean how can simply plugging it to a workikg pc make the drive workable?
  8. you just discover hot water!!!!
  9. i had to watch this 3 times because i kept getting distracted by those extra long unnecessary hand zooms
  10. what if you don't have any proper cables? some people couldn't afford it. hmm is there's any alternative? also i never heard anybody do this. but suppose you swwap hardirive literally? like putting windows xp hardive inside windows 98? will that work? or windows 98 hardrive inside xp? my home edition xp literally died from shock in the motherboard. so what if i put the xp hardive into windows 98 and switch things around?
  11. you should have disabled the alarm before you broke in to steal there computer info...lol...good video..
  12. bro is the police coming for you or some thing
    lol
  13. The problem is every hard drive has a different pin configuration. How do you find a cable that matches?
  14. I have a question. Granddaughters HD is good and works. Her old MacBook 2007 has no screen. I tried booted it up with a mini display port to no avail. I put it in an external HD case and booted it up on my MacBook. The problem is that it has a password and she has no Idea what it is. I know how to bypass or hack it to get a new password but I cannot do from her MacBook because it has not screen and will not boot off of another monitor from her computer. What options do I have. I can only boot it off my MacBook
  15. I have a WD10EURX, i made it a hard drive for my desktop it was actually from a DVR Cable Box, now my Desktop one day just never worked it powers up but it doesnt show up on the monitor, i need something that is guaranteed to work, i bought a thing that can power my sata hard drive which was a plug and play but it doesnt show up on any computer i try it on, all you hear is the hard drive spinning
  16. Hi... I wanted to ask you something ... I have a 2010 Mac Book pro lap top, and i been through a situation in which turning on the computer would take so long and then when the screen pops up, that rainbow circle starts and would not stop at all.. So i took it to apple and they claim that the hard drive inside is burned out..Though the guest login from the computer works to use internet. Not my own account. Though i lost so much family photos and videos that was stored in there. Photos from when I was young until present.. Now can i retrieve those data out even though apple could not retreive them and then later tried to send me to someone else to get the data out and spend over $1,000 bucks to get them?... I didn't do of course.. but i wanted to know if its possible that the data can still be located and transferred into another computer?.. please let me know if this is possible. Thanks a lot.
  17. what did u used to record windows 7 screen?
  18. This video is ok if the viewer is new to computer hardware.  You didn't show us how to make the cables, just to go buy them.  It wss useless to me.
  19. Thanks! Good introduction. Now, first hurdle: I must open the dead HP Omni100 to get that HD out. Second hurdle: where to get one of those cables (IDE or sata.. --> USB) ?
  20. OOMG what is that siren for? I can't stand it!