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Yesterday, I spent most of the day working from home in order to be present when my new PC arrived.  It did not arrive until much later in the day than I anticipated, so I wound up working from home.  I had some documentation to review, so this was not as bad as I suspected.

When I opened up my new machine, I immediately set about cracking it open and seeing if I could attach my old hard drive internally and pull the data I needed off of it.  Here, I was foiled.  I had thought that the optical drive–in this case, a DVD-ROM–was going to be an older Parallel ATA (PATA) connection.   Much to my surprise, the drive was a Serial ATA (SATA) optical drive.  My idea of moving my CD-RW drive from my old machine to my new one is dashed upon the rocks of reality.  I am not too dismayed, but this just means that at some point I will also need to spring for a SATA re-writable drive–either DVD or CD.

At this point, I do some Internet searches to determine what store near me has an external enclosure for my old hard drive.  The downtown Best Buy has nothing, at least according to the website, so I decided not to waste my time there.  My other two options are the CompUSA in Glen Burnie and the nearby Staples on Russell Street.  Much to my surprise, CompUSA website no longer lists the Glen Burnie store, but this is a result of its announced restructuring and closing on 28 February.  My closest option is Staples, and they have a USB 2.0 external enclosure for the drive.  I run over and buy it.

After I get the drive installed, I discover I have a small problem.  All versions of Windows–XP and Vista–fail to see any data on the drive.  As a matter of fact, both versions of Windows report that the drive is not formatted.  I don’t completely panic, but I am a little worried at this point.  Admittedly, unlike the sysadmin I am, I don’t have any recent backups of my personal data.  Nonetheless, since I know my old PC did not die as a result of hard drive failure, I am pretty confident that my data is intact.  I can hear no physical problems with the disk, so I think the problem with the drive is some “bits” became inappropriately flipped and everything sees the drive as bad.  Some more searching on the Internet ensues to find a good software solution to my problem.   One of the problems I had, though, is that all of my available working machines were not of an older vintage to temporarily install the drive and run some of the low-level diagnostic tools I had.  After doing some thinking about it before heading out for some beers, I decide to take the drive into the office with me today.  I know that we have some older Dell desktops, and as long as I have a PATA connection, I should be good.

After taking a look at some of the alternatives, I decide to make use of SpinRite, Steve Gibson’s disk repair utility.  I figure it is worth a shot before deciding to send it off to some data recovery shop.  I also believe that this tool will be able to address whatever came undone when my machine crashed.  This morning, I install the drive into a PC, and I let SpinRite do its thing.  I come back in a couple of hours, and the tests are done.  I take a quick look at the results, but everything seems in order.  I pop the bootable CD out, and reboot the machine for the true test.

SpinRite worked.  I was able to see the contents of my old hard drive, and all appears to be in order.  I reinstalled it into the external enclosure, and as I write this I am looking at the contents of the drive now.  So, later tonight, I will complete the task of migrating my data.  My lesson about backups has been learned, to be sure.