box of old ide drives

It should be set to master only some have an option for master with slave you dont want that

@sdtag

Get a nice 12 ga. pump shotgun (firing slugs ofc), and use the IDE drives for clay (er... HDD), pigeons.
The best part... unlike clay pigeons, you can use them over and over.


Or set them upright on a hillside, and invite all your friends to a gun party, with the HDDs as targets.
Award extra points if a bullet goes all the way through the drive.

I mean a drill press will work, but won't be a 10th the fun.

sdtag said:

I was a bad boy in my younger days.
I can't have guns anymore.
But it sure sounds like fun.
back to the (legal) drill press lol
Or a sledge hammer and a vice might be a bit more satisfying.
like the fax machine scene in office space lol

sdtag said:

I have a box of old ide drives that I want to go through to make sure there is no sensitive data on them before I dispose of them. I have a couple of ide to usb converters and so far out of trying about 10 drives I can only read one of them.
If there are jumpers on master slave or cs I pull them off.
I plug in power and let the drive spin up.
I plug in the ide adapter to the drive then to the usb port on my pc.
sometimes I get the doorbell notification sometimes I don't.
Nothing shows up in file explorer or disk manager.
Sometimes I can see them in the disk drives tab in the device manager but I can't do anything with them. If I click on properties then populate the drive I just get the spinning circle thing forever.
I have disk genius and mini tool partition wizard and neither will see the drives.
What am I doing wrong?
I want to see the data first but if I have to I can chuck them up in a drill press one at a time and make a YouTube video lol.
I just want to be sure that my 10 to 20 year old data won't end up in Russia or China or on the dark web. Paranoia.
TIA

set them as Master and also some will not like to run alone unless you set them as CS Cable Select.
You can also try to create a Linux USB live stick to see if Linux can read them better.
also some old IDE parks the head on the platters, so they can get stuck so the drive wont spin up.. and if you have some of them that wont spin up and dont make that search sound. you can give them a bump like i described in another thread with a picture Lost HDD But it only goes for drives that don't want to spin up.

as for disposing them.. use secure erase to make them clean and sell them to those that have Retro computers as hobby.. It starts to be hard to get hold of working IDE drives.
I'm one of the old-retro-part-hunters out there. *lol* But US is way to far to put a bid.
But do consider selling them after doing a secure erase of them.

sdtag said:

That was my original intent, to donate the drives to someone who can get some use out of them.
But out of 22 old ide drives I could only get intro 2 or 3 of them and I know I didn't wipe these drives before I shoved them into a box so I am afraid they are all headed to the drill press. I would have loved to donate these but my data safety comes first. I'm nice but not that nice I guess. lol

get some screwdriver kits with "all different" bits and remove the top cover of the drives. Then score the platters and snip off the read-write heads. Then remove the magnets, which are very useful. Then recycle the rest.

Have fun.

The magnets inside are really strong and is good to a lot of things.
as for the heads.. no need to cut them. The platters contains the data and is fragile against a hammer.
They do splits into small pieces, so use safety glasses and put some cloth rag on top the platters before you hit the hammer, that you can throw away afterwards..

The platters pieces become razor sharp like glass when they break so be careful.

Those few that did work. save them in case some one around you get the idea of starting with retro computers.. or maybe even you get curious about an old computer in the future two/three drives don't take up space so to speak