more geek talk - HD enclosure

One of the more useful purchases I've made in a while is something called an external hard drive enclosure. Basically, its something you put a hard drive into, then plug via cable into a USB port on a computer. Windows XP, at least, has no problem automatically setting up the new HD as another drive in its system. I was able to remove the hard drive from my busted Sony Vaio, install it in one of these things, and plug it into the new laptop. Not only has it made file recovery extremely easy, but I'm also able to continue to use the old HD as additional space, if needed.

I tried using the enclosure to read a hard drive I'd salvaged from my very first laptop, an ancient 2 GB drive. Unfortunately, the HD is so old that XP can't read it. The problem seems to be that the drive was never partitioned, since back then it wasn't neccessary for Windows to do that to drives, and because of that XP isn't able to assign a drive letter to it.

In any case, its a big improvement over the other option, which was to get a 40/44 pin converter and linking it into a desktop computer.