How to salvage data from harddisks of broken PC?

[Perfectionist]

I recently bought a new PC as my old one completely conked out, black screen nothing else (tried another computer on the same monitor and it worked fine, so not the monitor). Old rubbish anyway, pentium 4 2.6ghz, 1gb ram, radeon 9200 graphics card, I was meaning to upgrade for a long while now kinda forced. I'm guessing it's probably the graphics card that died, but as it's an AGP motherboard figured it isn't worth keeping the system on life support.

Now my only problem is, how to retrieve the data from the harddisks. They're pretty old ATA ones I think, and the new PC is SATA as far as I know, so I was thinking possibly one of those USB external hard drive reader things like the Police use? I'm not sure what the name of the actual thing is though to go looking to buy one.

Thanks for any help never been that good with the technical stuff

[0iD]

Buy a cheapo external sata drive caddy (doesn't have to be anything fancy), pop them in, plug into your new PC and copy data across. Sorted

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=222999
http://www.scan.co.uk/Index.aspx?NT=1-0-19-508-0

[integerspin]

Hasn't the motherboard got an ide channel?

Or am I showing my ignorance, 2.6 pentium, sounds pretty new to me;-)

[Perfectionist]

Yeah it's IDE, I guess that one won't work then

There's a bunch of different categories for different sizes on both websites (inch-wise not gigabytes), Is this measuring the height of the HDD lying flat or the width or length? I'm unsure which type my 2 are at the moment, other than that I guess I'll be getting an IDE/SATA combination (rather than just IDE, so I can also use it for future HDDs rather than it being kinda wasted)

[strike-down]

You can get the equivelent IDE caddy, Can pick them up for a couple of quid off fleabay

[Perfectionist]

Yeah but what about the size issue? My question in my last post second paragraph

[strike-down]

Sorry dude, missed that bit. Im tired and need sleep. Thats my excuse If its come from a desktop PC then its more than likely that its gonna be a 3.5 inch drive and its the width of the drive afaik

[KidChameleon]

If the hard drive is from a desktop it will be a 3.5" drive. 2.5" drives are mainly for laptops.

[Perfectionist]

Ah great, thanks!