I have an old hard drive that I removed from my pc and want to reteive
some files from it.  All I have now is a laptop so I'm going to use an
external case hooked to my USB port.  The drive has Win98 and my
laptop is XP, are there and special precautions I need to take before
hooking it up?  And will I be able to do what I need?  Afterwards I
want to format the external drive.

It shouldn't do anything, just make sure to boot it as slave and move
the little jumper on the back of the drive to make it a slave...
otherwise it should go off with out a hitch.

Do you mean an external USB hard drive enclosure?

If so, XP should have everything you need to search through the drive.
Hopefully you have antivirus software on the XP machine, though?

I do not believe jumpers matter when it comes to USB hard drive
enclosures (at least it doesn't in my experience with them), which is
very nice. :)

I am assuming that you have an external USB enclosure. I do exactly
what you are wanting to do almost every day for clients...hooking
their IDE drives to my laptop or another computer via USB.  You need
to make sure that you have adequate antivirus protection before doing
this, especially if you are uncertain about whether or not the old
drive could contain any viruses.

Different drives work differently with these USB/IDE adapters. Some
drives work with the jump set to master (often), some at Cable Select
(often), and some at Slave (less often).  I have had not good success
with older Quantum drives, but most Western Digital, Seagate, IBM, and
other big name brands give me little trouble.

You will see that the hard drive will initialize (search for driver,
add drive letter, etc) or it will do nothing. If it does nothing, it's
quite possible that the jumper isn't set correctly. However, if it
does begin to initialize, be sure to give plenty of time for it to
complete the initialization (Windows will usually indicate that the
hardware is ready for use or you are able to access the files under
the new drive letter). If you interrupt the process by unplugging it
from the USB port or interrupting the power, you can damage the
partition table and render the partition unreadable to Windows.

I had just done this a couple of days ago. I connected a 3.5 gig hard
drive from an older machine to my win xp pro laptop. Just make sure
you have the jumper pin set to master (and also make sure the IDE and
power cable are securely connected in the enclosure) and connect the
enclosure and power on.
There is no precaution necessary to do this. Well, just make sure the
drive is not shaken or dropped by accident even from very small
heights, limit it to light motion.

Windows xp will recognize the external hard drive automatically and
install it (regardless of what OS is in it, as long as the file system
is compatible) Then you should be able to copy and paste all the files
and folders at once. Might take a while since the hard drive might be
slow.

To format it, just right click on the drive letter in My Computer and
choose format. You can select to do a quick format. It should take
only about a minute or two.

be careful you can do this however there are a few things you need to know.
1: do not hook the usb drive up untill after the computer is booted
some labtops can boot off of usb drives. if this disk has any viruses
and the labtop boots off of the drive they could transfer to your
labtop
2: if you do not have good and curent antivirus you can use this free
sight to scan the usb drive http://housecall.trendmicro.com
it sounds like you already know everything else you need to know if
you want further asistence emaile me goodfdg@hotmail.com i might be
willing to talk on the phone
best of luck
the megreger

I have done the same thing, but what I am trying to do is boot from
the USB hard drive.  I have already scan it for virus and what not and
it is clean, but I need to boot from it so I can update the Windows
Software on it.