Question struck by lightning

[mij22]

I should know how to do this but don't... have a pc, seems to power up but nothing comes up on screen, just black, after a lightning strike. I have another pc now but need to know how to find out if there's any viable data on the struck HDD. the new pc has a ssd. the old hdd was the o/s drive for the now dead pc. how do I hook up the old HDD to the new pc to see if I can recover anything, and if i can recover stuff how to change old hdd from o/s drive to just a storage drive for the new pc? many, many thanks for any help!

 

[DSzymborski]

Just install everything normally on the SSD and plug in the hard drive. Just make sure to set it to boot to the SSD in the BIOS. There's nothing else special to get an old hard drive working on a new PC. Though once you recover the data and have it backed up, it would make sense to format the old hard drive to have it all nice and clean for data storage.

Also, a bit concerning that you want to recover stuff from the old hard drive. This suggests to me that you may not be keeping up with your backups, which is an extremely important part of PC upkeep. Hopefully if you're not backing up ,this is a good opportunity to start!

 

[mij22]

embarrassingly correct... the backup for my hdd was on the same hdd. stupid i know. most of my stuff is backed up on google drive/etc, but there are def still a few things on the hdd i'd still like to get to.

As of yet i don't know which component(s) of the struck system have been destroyed, but i will work on hooking up the old hdd to the new pc and see what i can see.

so basically i just plug a wire b/t the hdd and the new mb and see if the new system can read the drive? the bios on the new pc is very unfamiliar to me but I'll see what I can do.

I'm only vaguely familiar with these processes as I built a pc about 20 years ago but tech changes so fast it's hard to keep up.

Just install everything normally on the SSD and plug in the hard drive. Just make sure to set it to boot to the SSD in the BIOS. There's nothing else special to get an old hard drive working on a new PC. Though once you recover the data and have it backed up, it would make sense to format the old hard drive to have it all nice and clean for data storage.

Also, a bit concerning that you want to recover stuff from the old hard drive. This suggests to me that you may not be keeping up with your backups, which is an extremely important part of PC upkeep. Hopefully if you're not backing up ,this is a good opportunity to start!

 

[DSzymborski]

embarrassingly correct... the backup for my hdd was on the same hdd. stupid i know. most of my stuff is backed up on google drive/etc, but there are def still a few things on the hdd i'd still like to get to.

As of yet i don't know which component(s) of the struck system have been destroyed, but i will work on hooking up the old hdd to the new pc and see what i can see.

so basically i just plug a wire b/t the hdd and the new mb and see if the new system can read the drive? the bios on the new pc is very unfamiliar to me but I'll see what I can do.

I'm only vaguely familiar with these processes as I built a pc about 20 years ago but tech changes so fast it's hard to keep up.

Yup, plug it in and see what happens. I have data hard drives that are on their third or fourth computers.