Swapping an old hard drive.

[maaswhole]

I found an old computer in the basement which died a while back. It ran windows 98, and that's about all I know about that machine.
I thought it would be fun to look at the stuff on the old hard drive, but wasn't sure how to do that.
I tried just sticking it in my newer tower, and it looked like it was going to boot, the Window's 98 window came up, but then it hit an error screen and the muse didn't work so I was stuck.
You can probably tell I'm pretty savvy at this stuff.
Is there an easy way to look at the contents of the hard drive?

 

[cboucher]

You're not going to boot from that hard drive by putting it in another PC. What you should do is get an external USB hard drive enclosure, put your old hard drive in that and then connect it via USB to a working PC. It will show up as an additional drive with a new drive letter. (The same way a flash drive would show up).

 

[familyman1]

You could also install it in the system as a slave drive. Then you can look at the contents of the drive.

 

[maaswhole]

Thank you for the help. I looked around and no local joints have a HD case in stock, and like the idea of saving $40 to $70, so I thought I'd try plugging it directly into the tower.

I assume once I set the HD to slave and plug it in, I can look at the contents through My Computer, like a flash drive?

The hard drive is a Quantum Fireball ST, and looking at this page http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=379 it talks about both Slave, and Slave w/CLJ. Which setting do I want, what is CLJ?

Thanks in advance and again.

 

[cboucher]

Only put it on slave if there is already a device plugged into the IDE cable and that device is set to master. If you have another IDE port on your motherboard and a spare IDE cable you set the old drive to master or CS as long as there is nothing else connected to that same IDE cable.