We have an old laptop whose AC adapter in is busted. It’ll stay powered on for just a minute or two before shutting off. This means of course that we can’t keep it on for long enough to charge the battery. Unfortunately, we have a year’s worth of photos of Lennie on this computer’s hard drive. This week, I went in search of a hard drive enclosure that would allow me to pull photos off the drive and then go on to use the drive as a portable external disk. I’ve bought two so far, and neither one has hardware that’ll accept the pins on my drive. This is where I hang my head in shame and admit that I don’t know very much at all about hardware. ATA vs. IDE vs. SCSI? It’s all Greek to me. Here I implore my friends who do know about hardware to help me out. Drive specs follow, along with photos of the pins.
Some strings from the back that look like model numbers:
HDD2188
MK8025GAS
Cylinders: 16383
Compaq P/N: 312954-001
Update: A coworker took a quick look at the images and said he guessed the piece pictured was a connector that could be removed. Sure enough, I gave a slight tug and the thing wiggled. So I tugged a little more, and there was a regular old IDE connector plugged into it. I currently have the drive mounted and am yanking pictures off of it. Whew.
Two Ells 
This solved my confusion. I pulled the extra little piece of plastic off and it plugged right into the case I originaly bought and thought was wrong. Thanks for the help!
This solved my confusion. I pulled the extra little piece of plastic off and it plugged right into the case I originaly bought and thought was wrong. Thanks for the help!
I am in the identical boat. FAT32 is useless for any length HD video, yet it seems to be the only format each Mac and Windows can read/write.
I’ve a Passport moveable USB disk I intended to share my video (of weddings,birthdays, and so forth), but it seems useless for this purpose. How can I read/write NTFS for this disk so I can share with my much less enlightened Windows brethern ?