Well, here we are again, a few months after my computer went kaflooie....if ya all remember, my windows got corrupted and Staples wanted $195.00 minimum to TRY to get my windows back up and operating.....

so, I went and bought a new computer, but I have realized over the last couple of months that I really do have some files in the old computer that I really do not want to lose. If my windows program wouldn't open and was corrupted, is the hard drive still viable and could my poetry files be retrieved by those hard drive back up systems I see for sale everywhere or won't that work because even if I do plug in the old computer, it won't start up because of the windows issue..... what I mean to say here is can those hard drive retrieval thingies still work without windows having to start up????

This post has been edited by compudodo: Jun 4 2009, 04:13 PM

I suspect you're talking about a docking station, it connects to the working system via USB, some have eSATA, then you simply plug a hard drive into it to access it without opening your systems case, very handy tool if you do this a lot, in fact I am contemplating getting one myself, but there is a major draw back with these things, they only take Sata drives, well I have never seen one for ide drives anyway, because I was hoping to find a dock capable of both drive types due to the number of various drives I deal with, and this is made worse if you want to include laptop hard drives, well ide ones anyway, because they are a different size, Sata it make no difference the dock can take any Sata drive, but not ide.

Now unless you do this a lot it is not worth the money to get a dock, BUT, that said, if you are really that unsure about going inside a system then this is an excellent choice as it requiters no special knowledge, but again this only helps if you have got Sata hard drives, also don't think such a dock will allow you to recover data, it wont, what it does allow though is for you to access the hard drive placed in the dock and drag any files you may want to keep, and you can do the same thing without a dock using the above guide, but that only applies if you can see them, if the drive is corrupted and you can't see\access it then the dock will not make it any more accessible, hope that explains a bit.