Is it safe to put a damaged hard drive in a working PC?

[catfishydouglas]

PLEASE READ:
The title makes this sound pointless... but you see, I have some old broken PC's lying around... they have been sitting in a old storage sheds that get to subzero temperatures I believe, and I'm pretty sure that the hard drives in them are broken... but they have valuable data and would just be lovely if I could slip the old hard drives into my fairly new PC build (built back in September), and restore all the data back onto the PC... but is it possible if the Hard Drives are broken? Will it break anything? Thank you!

 

[mjslakeridge]

How old are the old HDDs? Do they have SATA or IDE connections? If you do bring them in from the cold, let them acclimate to room temperature before trying to install them. as there may be some condensation formed when they warm up. Maybe wait a couple of days. You won't damage your pc by trying to install the old HDDs, they will either be recognized or not.

You can get a USB external drive bay (caddie) fairly cheap. Some even have IDE connections, just make sure you know which connections you need.

 

[Math Geek]

the drive may or may not work but either way there won't be any danger to the pc itself. if the drive does not work, then the pc just won't recognize it. nothing to worry about for the pc itself.

i do this almost daily in my pc repair business and know there is no concern to my shop pc when hooking up any hdd. even ones i know have a virus on them is not an issue

 

[USAFRet]

Another vote for getting a USB dock. SATA+IDE dock will cover just about any drive you come across.

Now...if the drives are 'broken', you probably can't get anything off them. But it won't hurt the actual PC.

 

[catfishydouglas]

Alrighty! Thank you so much for the replies guys! It helped a lot! I apologize for frequent typos and grammatical issues... I was in a short rush... Thank you!

 

[catfishydouglas]

P.S. My HDD is SATA.