Vantec SATA/IDE to USB Adapter

[Rob Williams]

Working on PC's is fun, all except data recovery. It's a pain tearing your PC apart to simply stick another drive inside. Today we look at a smooth little gadget that takes away that pain.

You can read the review here and discuss it here!

Hi Rob,

Great review, I actually just ordered one of these, my wife called me (I'm out of town) and told me that the computer broke. From the symptoms she described it sounds like the motherboard was shot. My first aim is to backup all data on the HDD.

My question to you is, if my hard drive in the computer was fdisk'ed into four drive letters, if I hook it up via USB to my work laptop, will the four drive letters mount OK?

- Bill Cahill

[Rob Williams]

This was actually Matts review, but I don't see that being a problem. I've partitioned my 2.5" drive before and the computer picked up on all of them when connected via USB.

So no, I doubt it will be a problem. Please let us know when you give it a try though. If for some reason it doesn't, which I really can't see, then you may need a different type of converter (Like an PCMCIA S-ATA Card).

Thanks, I'll let you know!

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Thanks, I'll let you know!

Worked perfect, first time! Was able to save data to my work laptop.

Bad mobo turned out to be a cooling fan that failed while I was out of town... chipset melted down. Abit users beware, they make great mobos but I replaced this fan and heatsink twice. Keep an eye on your fans!

Ordered a refurb Socket 478 mobo to replace. Hard to find these anymore! Will be making a new PC in the next year but I want to keep the old one around, it's been a good one.

[madmat]

Glad to hear that you got your data saved. The Vantec USB to SATA/IDE converter has become a trusted and necessary piece of test equipment in my arsenal. I think it'll do the same in yours.

[Rob Williams]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Worked perfect, first time! Was able to save data to my work laptop.

Great to hear! That must have been a relief.

Just purchased to check my son's laptop drive. Was able to use the maintenance program on the recovery cd to resolve the problem after some trouble shooting.
My Question. Can I use this device to copy the old drive (which is only 30 gig) to a larger 80 gig drive and get all the xp os on the new drive.

Thanks,

Travis

[Rob Williams]

That might be a little trickier... You -can- just try copying everything over as normal, but you will likely need to use the WinXP CD and hit up the command prompt to "fixmbr" or "fixboot". I doubt that copying the files over would make the drive bootable.

If anyone else has any ideas, jump in!

[madmat]

Use Norton Ghost or another drive image copying program and it'll work like a champ. Just make certain to use the USB drivers option with Ghost if that's the program that you settle on.

I just had windows crash on me, it boots up to the windows logo and crashes samething with safemode and i want to pull data off the drive will this product work for that?

[madmat]

Yep, it'll do quite nicely.

I just purchased a converter and was wondering how to use it. That users manual that came with it was worthless. When I plug in the hard drive to the adapter and then USB into the computer, the light comes on and I can feel the hard drive moving. Then the computer recognized the device. How can I access the files on the hard drive once it's connected. I'm no computer guru, so any help is appreciated.

[madmat]

Open my computer and you'll see another hard drive there. Just click on it and it'll open in Explorer and you can browse to whatever files/folders you need.

I had the same problem.... everything is plugged in and working great but I do not have the hard drive in My Computer, even after refresh. Swapped the hard drive and same problem. Tried on another system... same problem. I know these hard drives are partitioned well... use IDE to access them all the time.