Many times I have received phone calls from people who's Macs fried their logic board, or power supply and were not worth fixing, but still had important data on their Hard Drive.

Most people don't realize that the internal HD in almost all older Macs will plug right into an external SCSI port with the right cables, and a power supply. You don't really need the assistance of a technician to retrieve data from the Hard Drive a dead computer. If you know enough to install a RAM upgrade, you can probably do this yourself.

An old SyQuest drive, or external HD case is the perfect thing for recovering data from a severely damaged Mac.

When I have to repair an older Mac that won't boot, I often remove the Hard Drive and put it in an external case, allowing me to connect it to my PowerBook, and work on it from there. This eliminates a lot of possible problems and once I have an HD that's tuned up, and working correctly it's much easier to find out what else is wrong with the computer.

In my experience its often easier to just copy the data off the damaged HD, reformat it, and put the data back on, rather than trying to patch up a severely damaged directory with Norton Utilities. This procedure has the added advantage of making a backup of the data from the broken machine in case something goes wrong during the repair process.

In the mid 1990s when most Macs began shipping with IDE/ATAPI Hard Drives getting the data off an internal HD got harder. IDE drives of course cannot be connected to a SCSI port, so they have to be hooked up internally to a Mac with an IDE port in the motherboard, or to an IDE card installed in a PCI slot. Often the easiest way to mount the Mac-less HD is to swap it with the internal IDE HD from another Mac, and then boot up from a CD, the hard drive will mount and you cancopy the data off the drive via AppleTalk.

It is however possible to configure the drive out of the dead machine as the "slave" drive on the IDE bus so you can have two HDs installed at once.

IDE devices do not have IDs as SCSI devices do, there is a "Master", and a "Slave" device, the master being the primary device on the IDE bus, and the slave being the lower priority device. On many newer Macs the internal HD is the master, and the CD-ROM or DVD drive is the slave, so in order to connect another drive as a slave you have to disconnect the CD drive.

Connecting a drive from another Mac as a "slave" involves reconfiguring the jumpers or DIP switches on the bottom of the drive. Sometimes there is a small map on the top of the drive explaining how to place the jumpers to set the drive to slave mode. If you can't find anything on the drive, visit the drive manufacture's web site, and look in the support section. Usually there are detailed instructions for configuring the drive. Once the drive has been set up as a slave, connect it in place of the CD drive, start up the Mac, and the drive should mount on the desktop.

One other option is to find an older PowerMac with both IDE, and SCSI busses such as a 5200, or 6500. These Macs can be booted from an external SCSI HD, and then an IDE drive with data that needs to be recovered can be swapped without any reconfiguring from a dead Mac.

Now that summer is almost here, it's a good idea to make sure your Mac's case is ventilated well, and the case is not caked with dust causing it to overheat. Many logic boards, and power supplies die in the summer from overheating. Most Macs have a cooling fan exhaust hole on the back, and some newer models like the G4 Cube, and iMacs just have vent holes with no fan. It's important to keep papers, and other junk away from the vents so air can flow. Next time you go to turn on the air conditioning in your office, think of your Mac, and make sure it's air ducts aren't blocked.

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