Well... one out of three can't be that bad...

Having cast heavy hints for the last month or so, I actually got one of the items that I desperately wanted this Christmas: A USB-to-IDE/EIDE/SATA converter cable adaptor, and let me tell you, it does exactly what it says on the tin.

This is it: IOMAX USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE Adapter Kit with Power Adapter for 2.5/3.5/5.25 Inch SATA or IDE Drive.


As you may recall from an earlier entry here, my desktop PC, an aging 2.6gig machine running XP, died on me mid-boot some time ago. Luckily, I had most of the data already backed up (remarkable foresight for me, as the last two machines I had weren't even partially backed up), so no great loss there, but I have long since lost the disks for a lot of my old software, including my copy of Pagemaker, and was hoping that the main boot disk was recoverable, so that I could attempt to move the package across to the my netbook.

Unfortunately, of the three hard drives from the desktop PC, only one wasn't completely borked, and was recoverable (as well as already being backed up externally for other reasons, which was nice). The other two, sadly, were completely unrecoverable: One (the boot drive, C:) was recognised by the adaptor and drivers, but couldn't be read, and the other (the primary data drive onto which I'd carefully backed up a load of software, including PageMaker, D:) wasn't; as neither of the failed drives could be read, it somehow suggested that either their file allocation tables were stuffed, or that they were physically broken somehow. Given the masses of clicking and clacking from them when they were plugged in, I strongly suspect the drives had physical errors that prevented their being read.

So, it's out with the big magnets, and render the two unrecoverable drives totally blank, then the industrial drill to ensure that they remain so - the only way, short of nuking them from orbit, to assuring one that old personal data cannot be recovered from old drives. It's extreme, but then I still haven't been ID thieved as far as I know, so I must be doing something right!

Anyhow, all in all, this converter cable is a very useful bit of kit that has, I reckon, saved me a packet in IT support costs from the local shop. It's also sized for both 2.5 and 3.5 inch IDE/EIDE drives, as well as the new SATA format, so it's fairly well future-proofed, I think :)

In the mean time, I guess I'm going to have to save up my hard-earned and either buy a copy of Adobe "InDesign", or find an open source DTP package that'll read the layered pagemaker files. Oh well. These things happen, I suppose.

One out of three can't be that bad, when all's said and done, after all, can it? ;-)