Testing old IDE hard drives

[Jim]

Recently, I acquired - legitimately with previous owners agreement,
etc. - a number of older IDE drives. The owners have asked me to
recover and archive any useful data and then use, or junk, the drives
however I want. My issue is this: all of the drives were used as the
boot/system drive on the PC's they were pulled from. Will this screw
up the working test system?

What kind of test setup should I use? How about IDE set up? Slave
drive on Primary IDE interface? Is it worthwhile using a removable
hard drive chassis or would this be overkill?

 

[Dave]

Recently, I acquired - legitimately with previous owners agreement,
etc. - a number of older IDE drives. The owners have asked me to
recover and archive any useful data and then use, or junk, the drives
however I want. My issue is this: all of the drives were used as the
boot/system drive on the PC's they were pulled from. Will this screw
up the working test system?

Not at all. It works fine. Just as long as YOU don't get confused, and
start saving files to the temp hard drive, or deleting files from your
primary boot drive! But the hardware works fine and your normal OS will
boot as usual.

What kind of test setup should I use? How about IDE set up? Slave
drive on Primary IDE interface?

Yeah, that will work.

Is it worthwhile using a removable
hard drive chassis or would this be overkill?

Depends on how many hard drives you are talking about. if more than about
10, or if you anticipate getting some more later, then go with the removable
hard drive chassis. Otherwise, just run your test system with the side
panel off while testing, you don't need to mount the hard drive, just set it
somewhere that power and data cables will reach. And watch your jumper
settings. Set them all to slave while you are thinking about it. -Dave