Hi Peter! On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 4:50 PM, AZ Pete wrote: > Hi All, > > I have a friend who's laptop (Windows) died, but thinks the drive should be > ok. She bought a new MacBook and would like to copy her data from the old > laptop. My thought was to take the drive out of the defunct laptop and put > it in a USB enclosure which could then be connected to the new Macbook. > > Does anyone have any recommendations on USB drive enclosures makes/models? > > I'm very well versed with Windows and Unix, but I'm not a Mac person. I'm > assuming that this scenario would work. Let me know if I'm missing > something. > > Any thoughts would be helpful. > > Peter > > > 1) Is this an IDE/SATA or SCSI drive? 2) Are you sure it was not part of a RAID (10 or 5) volume? 3) Drive Size? [Assuming this is NTFS? WindowsXP (not 3.11)] I would just pop it out and head over to Fry'sand see what they have? Open the packaging for the enclosures and verify fit, and compatibility (i.e. be sure your SCSI connection is not super mini for instance)? I haven't used Computercablesource.comsite, but they have a good display of the many different drive enclosure types. [NOTE: While firewire is fast, plug and play across platforms leaves something to be desired; stick with USB.] Your drive enclosure choices are going to be limited by drive type; drive size - but anything USB is going to "work" with OS X (automagically). Under linux you will have to mount it with a type switch command: Plug her in: "dmesg" to get drive name: /dev/$name example= /dev/sdb or /dev/sdb1 (first partition) mkdir /mnt/NTFS mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/$name /mnt/NTFS You should be able to read/write everything. NOTE: If the drive contains low level virus, malware or trojan files, there would still be a risk of cross platform infection . Be sure to protect and scan your new OSX before "unsafe" hex. -- (503) 754-4452 (623) 688-3392 http://www.it-clowns.com | http://www.obnosis.com