old HD
 

i got a HD from a computer bought in 1989. I cant find any jumper setting on it. It came out of a 386 computer. I need to get some files from it. I dont realy feel like installing it in a computer but if i half to i will. I tried installing it in a 3.5" usb enclosure and it didnt work. maybe if i stick in a computer and copy the files to a newer drive i can then put the newer one in the enclosure.

It came out of a old Dos Computer so that may be why it wont come up in windows.

1989?! Whoa man, you got problems.

1989 pre-dates ATA standards by 5 years. So while you have an IDE drive, it may not be compatible with just any old system, as some manufacturers liked to 'tweak' the IDE design (which conveniently made it compatible only with systems they specified). Further, at this point even ATA-1 is considered obsolete and no longer supported by modern motherboards. Anything predating that, not a chance.

Your best bet? If you can find the spare bits and pieces lying around, slap together a 486 or Pentium I system with a CD-RW and see if that will read the disk. That's a lot of work for a couple of old files on some museum piece. Unless you can't live without those files I don't think I'd bother.

i cant live w/o out them. Its 10 years worth of designs. i ended up pluging it into a pentium 2 i had sitting around and booting off it and hooking up a zip drive to it and copying the 100mb hd on a 250 meg zip disk. Then i copied those files on to a 60 gb new maxtor hd in my usb external box.