Copying data from Internal Harddrive without the Mac

[martyn1672]

Hi

Hopefully a simple one.
My niece has an Emac which has now come to the end of its life. It will not power up and I think the MOBO has gone.
She has now bought an Apple Laptop instead.

However she really needs all the data which was on her old machine.

Is there a way to copy the contents of the Internal Hard-drive without the use of the old machine?
I have already removed it.

Thanks in advance.

 

[PaulexPC]

I'd recommend you buy an inexpensive external USB enclosure. I think you can pick one up for less than $20. Since the eMac probably has a 3.5 inch drive, you need an enclosure that has a wall-wart power supply. Then you plug it into any running Mac and bingo, it pops onto your desktop.

 

[pinback pro]

agreed with PaulexPC. some enclosures are like $10. if you can't get the old mac to boot, then you'll need to do some surgery and get the old hard drive out, put it in an enclosure and hook it up.

if it boots, but the OS doesn't get going, then you may have a chance to hold down the T key while booting...that is if the emac is running tiger leopard.

 

[RemarkabLee]

I would imagine you would need to specifically look for an enclosure that supports Parallel ATA (PATA), as opposed to the more recent Serial ATA (SATA) interface standard. I doubt the eMac would have incorporated SATA (can anyone confirm?)