All, I've removed a faltering hard drive from a friend's computer and I'm looking for a replacement. The drive was in an HP computer and is 160 GB. My friend doesn't have any money to buy a replacement, so I'm looking for a good used or new but unused hard drive, very cheap. She's a very light user as well, so even a 40G drive would likely be suitable.

Hopefully her old drive is readable enough that I can create a workable clone image.

I'd be willing to trade some other parts or service for the drive.

It's only 20GB, but I've got a very basic Seagate 7200RPM IDE drive, OEM labeling. I wrote on it for clarity but it's never been installed; it's been sitting in my parts collection in an anti-static bag for years.

Even 20 GB would likely work for now. My friend is unemployed and is currently moving to live with a friend of hers. She likely won't even have Internet access for a while. Certainly when she's in a better situation I could upgrade from there if needed.

Would you want/need anything in trade for this, Theo? You can email me to discuss. I'll treat ya to a beer or two sometime if nothing else.

My friend is a writer and has some material and email she'd like to recover. This help would mean a lot to her as she's got a lot of other stressors in her life right now.

I've tried using my friend's drive in my external (IDE to USB) enclosure, but it's not spinning up. Maybe my enclosure has gone bad as well. I'll need to perhaps get a cable like Orion had at Common Roots, or another external enclosure, or another computer with an open IDE slot, to see if I can get this drive to work.

i can bring my adapter to cr next wed.

I also have plenty of spare IDE cables (for normal direct-to-mainboard use).

That will be good for a read test, but if readable I'll be attempting to clone it and I'll need some time to use the cable or some other setup. Orion, just curious, are there similar types of cables for SATA drives?

I've seen this quite a bit with the external Western Digital MyBook enclosures.

Hey everyone,

I'm still looking for a replacement hard drive. The drive I am replacing was giving physical media error warnings and is going bad, but is still readable with a USB adapter cable. I am looking for a size of at least 40GB, and 7200 RPM would be nice. Hopefully I can successfully ghost or xcopy the old drive onto the new.

If anyone has a spare, lightly or never used drive, let me know.

Thanks!