I am interested in transferring the data from my dead laptop to either
a new pc or mac...is there a company out there which makes a cable
which will attach to my current IDE travelstar drive. I want a
solution which will go to something like USB or Firewire that will
allow me to transfer the data off the dead drive.

Hope this makes sense. Thanks.

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Request for Question Clarification by techtor-ga on 01 Jul 2003 21:33 PDT

I wonder what you mean by "dead drive"... do you mean it's just not
mounted on a laptop, or did it have problems when you took it out? By
the way, you could try connecting it directly to the inside of a PC
using IDE cable. The Travelstar looks like it has an IDE interface. By
the way, for technical support, the Travelstar line seemed to have
been given by IBM to Hitachi.

Having recently done something like this, I know the options.

1. You can get an inexpensive adapter that allows you to connect the
drive to a standard PC's IDE connection.
http://cyberguys.com/templates/searchdetail.asp?T1=161+0405&E1=1354 is
an example.  Be aware that most notebook drives don't have
master/slave jumpers, so you'd usually want to connect it to an IDE
controller as the only drive.

2. An enclosure which accepts a 2.5" drive and turns it into an
external USB or FireWire drive. 
http://cyberguys.com/templates/searchdetail.asp?T1=163+0149&E1=4512 is
an example.

Now as it happens, I was transferring data from an IBM TravelStar
drive to a new Hitachi TravelStar drive.  The IBM had developed
numerous bad sectors and I was unable to use "disk image" copying
software with it, so I had to resort to mounting it normally and
copying individual files.