Recovering hard drive data Options

[Will E. Ham]

I have had my iMac G4 for many years – maybe 5 or 6 years, but I forget. It had been playing up a lot recently, very sluggish and crashed a lot, and I had thought it was down to lack of RAM and the amount of programmes that I had installed on it. I couldn’t even move the icons on the desk top and CD burning had become impossible, however I mainly used my iPod and external hard drive so it didn’t cause too much of a problem.

Anyway one day it went to pieces and I thought the hard drive had gone. Having a friend who worked in IT support – I handed it over to him to see if he could resolve the problem before I took it any further and though he didn’t manage to fix it – he did discover two things.

Firstly, and you may think me silly for not considering this before, but having a sociable cat that like to sit by the computer for both the company and the heat that it throw out there was a lot of cat hair inside. I hadn’t really considered the position of the venting holes before, but the whole of the inside of the computer was filled with animal hair and dust. The second thing that he discovered is that it wasn’t a problem with the hard drive – it was the mother board. Whether the fault was to do with the hair or not I don’t think I’ll ever know.

I got some quote for fixing the motherboard and was basically told it would cost more to fix it than I had originally paid for it and they offered me £50 to use it as scrap which I accept and kept the hard drive.

Now to the point. I have been unable to get any of my old files off the hard drive and though I have a new iMac (the same G4 model), I don’t want to risk putting my old hard drive in when the one in their works perfectly. I have heard there are casings you can get to put internal drives into making them similar to external hard drives. Has anyone ever tried this and if so where and how much do I have to pay to get one? If not can anyone suggest another way I might recover the data from the hard drive?

Any help would be very gratefully received.

[Roxanna Maynard]

I have experienced a similar problem with my iMac. I kept the hard rive and was able to put it into another older mac with a tower and gain the information off there.

You can get external harddrive enclosure really cheaply from ebay. It'll be quite slow, but you'll be able to get the information off and on to a new computer, then if you still want to keep the drive you can have it as an extra external storage device after reformatting. Check out http://search.ebay.co.uk/3-5-enclosure_W0Q...sooZ1QQfsopZ1QQ
ftrtZ1QQftrvZ1QQga10244Z10425QQsabfmtsZ1QQsacatZQ2d1QQsadisZ200QQsargnZQ2d1QQsasl
cZ3QQsatitleZ3Q2e5Q22Q20enclosureQQsbrftogZ1QQsofocusZunknown
to see a selection of cases that are available, though it was suggested to me that I should get a OWC enclosure as they are good quality and reasonably priced.

[Will E. Ham]

Thanks for the link. I bought one of the enclosures and will try and get the data off it over christmas I think. When I have plugged it in it has been really slow so I suspect it will take a number of hours to get about 30 GB worth of data off.