Restore data after motherboard death
- 01 January, 2010 10:14
- Comments 2
Peter's motherboard died. How can he retrieve the data on his hard drive?
I'm amazed that in this world of cheap external hard drives and near-universal broadband, people are still not backing up their data. It's real simple, folks: You should never have only one copy of anything.
If you want some advice about getting into the backup habit, see 7 Backup Strategies for Your Data, Multimedia, and System Files.
Be glad it was the motherboard that died and not the hard drive. If that were the case, you'd have to send the drive to a data recovery service that would charge you hundreds or even thousands of dollars to recover your data...if your data was recoverable.
But with a dead motherboard, you got off easy. All you need is an adapter that turns an internal IDE or SATA drive into an external USB drive. The Bytecc USB 2.0 Drive Mate is pretty good.
Remove the drive from the PC, plug it into the Bytecc, plug the Bytecc into a PC's USB port, and you have access to your old hard drive.
Add your comments to this article below. If you have other tech questions, email them to me at answer@pcworld.com, or post them to a community of helpful folks on the PCW Answer Line forum.
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Comments
Anonymous
Sounds easy doesn't it...
In a perfect world, that would work fine. (In a perfect world the MoBo wouldn't have died in the first place).
What if you are running an NT version with simple file sharing turned off with explicit permissions turned on.
You have to be savvy enough to be able to change the permissions back on the files to be able to access them again, and that's only if your other computer is running XP Pro, Vista Business/Ultimate or 7 Pro/Ultimate.
Too bad if you thought that it would be a good idea to encrypt your files with a third party program in case you computer was ever stolen.
What do you do if your computer is running Linux? You have to have another Linux computer and have SU access to once again be able to change the permissions on the files.
And worse of all, what if your Mac is the one that died, and you have secured your files with FileVault. Well you can forget ever seeing them again.
There is one way you can prevent all this, and that it <strong>Backup!!</strong>
Don't be complacent and think it will never happen to you, or that you can easily "plug in" your old HDD to a new computer.
By the way, I have used the ByteCC BT-300, and I wouldn't say it's worth the box it comes in.
Anonymous
Sounds easy doesn't it...
In a perfect world, that would work fine. (In a perfect world the MoBo wouldn't have died in the first place).
What if you are running an NT version with simple file sharing turned off with explicit permissions turned on.
You have to be savvy enough to be able to change the permissions back on the files to be able to access them again, and that's only if your other computer is running XP Pro, Vista Business/Ultimate or 7 Pro/Ultimate.
Too bad if you thought that it would be a good idea to encrypt your files with a third party program in case you computer was ever stolen.
What do you do if your computer is running Linux? You have to have another Linux computer and have SU access to once again be able to change the permissions on the files.
And worse of all, what if your Mac is the one that died, and you have secured your files with FileVault. Well you can forget ever seeing them again.
There is one way you can prevent all this, and that it <strong>Backup!!</strong>
Don't be complacent and think it will never happen to you, or that you can easily "plug in" your old HDD to a new computer.
By the way, I have used the ByteCC BT-300, and I wouldn't say it's worth the box it comes in.
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