I found an old 120 MB IDE Seagate drive in the attic of my parents house that used to be in one of my old PCs. I want to get it mounted on a modern system to see what I can get off of it but it is proving a bit challenging. It does spin up and I can hear the drive heads pull away from the parking magnet as soon as the platters hit operating speed.

So far I have tried connecting it to two different external drive controllers (USB, Firewire) and one PC (~1.3GHz) but there is no real communication between them. When connecting it to a USB to ATA adapter I have noticed something interesting: it spins down when the controller is connected to USB. If I simply turn on the power brick the drive will spin up but as soon as I connect the USB cable it will spin back down. I noticed the same thing when it was connected to a PC; if the ATA cable was plugged in when I tried to boot the PC the drive would refuse to spin up but if I left the ATA cable disconnected it would immediately spin up.

Suggestions?

[Edited on April 14, 2008 at 9:55 AM. Reason : dur]

4/14/2008 9:54:53 AM

so you've plugged it in to an ide cable as secondary...and booted to the primary drive? does the host os (im assuming windows here) see the 120gb drive?

4/14/2008 10:12:08 AM

^120 mb.

4/14/2008 10:29:03 AM

ouch

4/14/2008 10:36:03 AM

oh snap

i thought that was a large drive to have laying around in your parents attic...

i'm gonna guess that the drive is from 1992-1994ish...which makes me think you'll need an older computer than you're using to be able to read that drive

whats the model number of the drive? are you using one of the older ide cables?

this might help: http://www.techsupportforum.com/hardware-support/hard-drive-support/7566-slave-driving-ancient-120mb-hdd-modern-system.html

and this: http://ask.metafilter.com/42489/Ancient-Hard-Drive

4/14/2008 10:50:30 AM

Quote :

"i'm gonna guess that the drive is from 1992-1994ish...which makes me think you'll need an older computer than you're using to be able to read that drive"

The drive is from 1991, actually. It was originally in my i486/33.

Quote :

"whats the model number of the drive? are you using one of the older ide cables?"

Seagate ST3144A (I looked up the specs ... 3,211 RPM, 32K cache, 15 mbit/sec burst ... hehe)

And no, I am using more modern ATA cables; I hope I didn't damage the PCB somehow ...

Thanks for the links; I will start reading.

4/14/2008 11:28:07 AM