slaving a crashed sata drive

hello-

i think i already know the answer to this question but i want to see if anyone who knows about this can either shed come light or confirm what i already feared......

i have a pc in my hands that the sata drive has definitely gone bad on. being that a sata cable is unlike a pata cable in the fact that i only have 1 interface on each end. is there any way at all for me to slave my sata drive onto the pc without having to buy any extra hardware? where i sit right now is i'm about to order an external hard drive enclosure to throw the bad drive into in hopes that the os will recognize that drive when i boot up my new sata hdd. i realize that the drive could just be too far gone that it won't recognize it at all which is why i would like to try to do this without purchasing any extra hardware.

can anyone shed some light? (or confirm that my only hope is an external drive enclosure.) i have been doing a little reading and see that i could purchase a pci sata card but then i fall right back into the issue of $$$$$

thank you for your time!

 

I'm assuming the PC you want the SATA drive hooked up to doesn't have an on-board SATA controller, which means that there is no way to hook the drive up to that PC without the use of some additional hardware. You can go the external enclosure route (less than $25 or $30) or the PCI controller card route (up to $60 or more depending on brand/model/specs) or you can go with the IDE/SATA adapter (not the most reliable or sure-fire way to go, and at about $30 you'd be better off with the enclosure). Or go to a friends house that has a SATA capable system. Personally, I'd go the enclosure route, it's the most reliable and the most trouble-free way to go, and you'll get more use out of the enclosure; when you've recovered the data from the drive in question and it finally dies, you can use the enclosure with a different drive for data back up (which you have discovered is important to do on some type of schedule). If the SATA drive doesn't die, you can just keep using it as an external storage device....

Good luck! Keep us posted!

[dlb]
:major

(BTW- building a drive into an enclosure is totally simple!!! The enclosures come with instructions that you don't really need 'cuz it's really self-explanatory, and most also come with the tools you'll need too; usually just a really small philips screwdriver)

 

hey dlb

thanks for the response. i am still a little bit confused here. let me start by telling you that i am pretty fresh out of college so needless to say, i am always learning. i also haven't worked as much as i probably should have by now with sata drives so this technology itself is sort of foreign to me. the motherboard that i am hooking this hdd up to does have a sata controller. i have 4 sata ports in all and have tried switching this hdd to a different port using a different cable and the hdd was still not recognized in the bios. what i am hoping to do is get this replacement sata drive, configure the os so it is bootable and then would like to figure out the best way to slave this drive so i can pull the data off of it and then trash it. my thinking is that i will get this new drive, configure it, hook it up to my sata 0 port on the motherboard and then hook up the bad drive using a different sata cable(obviously) and then plug that into my sata 1 port on the motherboard. i find it hard to believe that this scenario wouldn't work because without checking i feel confident in saying that there is no limitation as far as how many sata drives you can run on a pc.

maybe i'm wrong though. someone from dell told me that this won't work. i find that hard to believe.

thanks again confusedconfused:confused