SATA-to-USB adapters

[unfaithfulsfan]

Just wondering if anyone has a workaround for this.

In XP, I could always connect a hard drive using a USB adapter and look at what was on the drive. Sometimes I'd have to break the password but eventually I'd get there. With 7, though, no matter what hard drive I connect via the adapter, I'm required to initialize the drive which completely defeats the purpose.

TechNet is no help at all: "Back up the data". Well that's just great. How am I supposed to do that if I can't access the damn data in the first place? It's a major PITA to connect the drive to my mother board and, in the case of this one particular drive that has a bad case of babylon, I don't want to connect it to my board and get all that crap in my registry.

Any suggestions? Thanks!
J

[sgkean]

I've used the hard drive docks with success. Thermaltake BlacX and one by Ineo (use this one for easy drive copies as well).

[unfaithfulsfan]

Thanks I'll give that a try. Just ordered it from the egg. Hope it works. Does not have an IDE option does it?

[sbohdan]

Thanks I'll give that a try. Just ordered it from the egg. Hope it works. Does not have an IDE option does it?

If your HDD has a IDE interface, than you need a dock with IDE. Something like this (gives you the option of connecting eighter SATA or IDE):


http://www.amazon.com/Sata-Hard-Drive-D ... n+ide+sata

or this:

http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Dock ... n+ide+sata

If you ordered a SATA only dock and you need to connect an IDE HDD, than just cancel your order and get one of the above or similar.

[skier]

well, are you trying to load a Windows 7 hard drive externally from an internal drive install to pull data off the external drive?

[unfaithfulsfan]

Thanks, sbohdan, too bad I was so quick on the trigger-too flippin' tired and flubbed the search on amazon. The one from NE will be here tomorrow so I'll just return it and order the one from amazon.

skier, that's exactly (sort of) what I need to do. The external drive is a Vista 64 bit drive from a Dell Inspiron that has a major babylon infestation. As I mentioned, I cannot access the data with my USB adapter because Disk Management insists that I initiate the drive. If I can't get rid of these last few files entrenched inside the AppData folder (which I cannot seem to get into no matter what I try) I'm going to be left with no alternative but to format the drive anyway. So far this malware has thoroughly defeated malwarebytes in both regular and safe modes, Dr. Web Cureit, PC Doctor, Advanced System Care Pro. AVG has had more success than any of the others but cannot get into the AppData folder either.

Ironically, my computer-illiterate brother said he had the same problem but SpyBot cleared it right up so that's my next attempt.

Thanks for the info!
J

[skier]

not sure how you've made out, but Linux liveCD's have always worked for me for finding files (or deleting in this case), but I would Run combofix (Combofix can go a little crazy sometimes, but if combofix cant find or remove a virus it either isnt a virus or it cannot be removed. also, run ATF Cleaner (All-user Temporary File cleaner) before running combofix

Usually with the babylon toolbars you can just uninstall it without a problem though

[unfaithfulsfan]

That's been my experience with Babylon, too, until now. "B/babylon" and every combination with * I could think of yielded nothing, yet whenever I opened a new tab in IE or FF it appeared to be a standard Google search page but the page title was "Babylon Search". Even when I pressed the Windows key and typed in "www.google.com" the Babylon page still came up. Same with Yahoo, MSN, CNN, etc.. Never seen anything like it.

You must have sent me a subliminal message last night. I could not for the life of me remember "ComboFix". Around 11:30 it finally came to me. I tried running it and it froze, too, in regular Windows and in Safe Mode. I just finally got sick of the BS and installed Windows 7. Fortunately the guy had nothing on his computer-no documents, no pictures, music, or video. No bookmarks. I mean zippo! Apparently, all he does is pay bills, check email and putz around the Internet. Thank God. There really wan't any data to lose. Whatever was locking up his machine was just a major annoyance more than anything malevolent, I think anyway. He hadn't been able to log into his bank account or email since the browsers started freezing so they didn't get his passwords, or at least I hope not.

On the subject of the drive docks, I just bought a USB 3.0 PCIE x1 card for an external drive I got a deal on. I'm looking at this dock http://www.amazon.com/SATA-Hard-Drive-D ... drive+dock. Wondering what's the opinion on USB 3.0 and whether this dock is worth the extra $20.

Thanks!
J

[skier]

well, depending if you actually need IDE (I dont have a single IDE drive anymore, except for a Pentium III machine), I'd just get a straight up SATA-to-USB 3.0 Adapter <-The one I have

as far as internal drives on any USB3.0 adapter, most of the time the write/read speeds are around 90MB/s on large files, with a variety of drives, USB2.0 is painfully slow in comparison

I considered getting a full 2.5+3.5 dock but wasn't worth it to me with all of the upgrades I was already doing to transition to USB3
(I got 2 USB3 controller Cards, a USB3 front panel card reader, SATA-USB3 adapter above, and a new PSU for my Server because I ran out of connectors on the factory Dell for the controller card)

[unfaithfulsfan]

I know IDE is rapidly going the way of the Dodo but it'd be nice to have given some of the PCs I wind up working on. Glad you mentioned 2.5" drives because I just flat out didn't even think about them. Thank God the one I'm looking at handles them. While I don't do a LOT of repairs, about 40% are laptops. I just hope this dock will allow me to see the contents of the drives like I used to be able to with the "caddy" when I was at the shop.

Guess I'll find out next week.

Thanks again for the assist!

[unfaithfulsfan]

It has been a while but I finally got to a point I absolutely had to access a drive without initializing it. So I got one of these http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002UA ... UTF8&psc=1 and it has been awesome for $45.