Recommendations wanted for 2.5" SATA HD adapter to USB

[ahhaa]

Hi Guys- my Q's are below, the top is just venting!

An artist friend has some important photos of her work & email contacts on an Acer 5534, a machine made in 2009.
It just went deado, which isn't that surprising as it was literally held together with scotch tape. Both the battery & the charger seem to be working.

When I couldn't wave my hands over it and make it live again, she rushed out and bought an Acer win10 notebook.
Well, that had an intermittently defective ON switch; I said take it back, but then it went into win10's first time startup and we had to name and password a few things until we got to her router ( to update windows ) and she didn't know her Xfinity password. She got on the phone and after 20 minutes or so Comcast deigned to talk with her.

Long story short, before the tech went postal ('Speak slower, I can't understand a word') he changed her password and she got online and signed into new machine accounts at M$ & Acer. Then of course, she turned off the machine and it in turn refused to restart.

Next day and she heads back to Walmart; where she returns everything, but winds up walking out with another Acer notebook (tho she'd been told by the same clerk 'this is our last one' 2 days before.)

Well I got called in again, because she couldn't get online again- yup, her password had been changed and she didn't write it down. (Someone once told her not to write down your password.)

Three more calls to Comcast, and as the sun sinks in the west, their 2nd tier tech changes her password again. (She had sorta explained about the 2 machines not working so they kept trying the cookiecutter 'reboot your router' mantra. Yehaa.

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OK my Qs. I don't have a lot of experience with win10s fussiness, or any of the various USB adapters for SATA laptop drives.

The drive is a Hitachi 5400 RPM 250 Gig SATA 3.0 Gb/s which wants 700 mA @ 5V.

Q Can anyone recommend the cheapest but good USB adapter cable, also the cheapest but good enclosure & adapter unit to make it into a portable drive?

Q Are there any potential problems with either USB 2 > 3 or with win10 itself (I remember on older drives there was a jumper for boot drives)?

Q Wild guess- how likely is it that it was the drive itself that failed in the 5534? (The case damage was most severe in the upper right just around the ON button, and the whole rear of the machine along the hinge was taped together...

Thanks guys... why don't I ever get any normal repairs?

[Cornucopia]

Take the ssd/hdd out of the old laptop (raw drive), pop it into a powered portable enclosure like those available from siig, syba, lacie, etc (not personally recommending any particular one), and connect (using whichever connection formats are available to enclosure & which match the new laptop - usb2, usb3, usbc, esata, thunderbolt). Get one that is properly externally powered.

Oh, and help your friend set up a new set of passwords on the router & new laptop & email accounts. But this time have them be acronyms for something near & dear to their heart so they"ll be able to remember it, even when not writing it down.

Scott

[cornemuse]

I have this one as everything seems to have usb 3 ports nowadaze:

https://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=103&cp_id=10315&cs_id=1031502&p_id=14597&seq=1&format=2

-c-

[Nelson37]

For the enclosure and cable, whatever name brand unit, with external power supply, is on sale at Newegg. Drive jumpers have been gone for a long time.

As for the drive itself, if the old PC showed no indication of power whatsoever, good odds the drive is OK. If it had power but no boot to the OS, odds go down a LOT. I would let the user pay for the enclosure. I would also bill them for the password reset, but then I would not have left the first time without having them WRITE DOWN these passwords and store them in a secure location, while also telling them I would be happy to bill them as many times as necessary until they learn to either store the passwords or memorize them, their choice. If you continue to solve their problem for free, the necessary learning will never take place.

[ahhaa]

If you continue to solve their problem for free, the necessary learning will never take place.

Too true, Nelson. I was more thinking like: if you teach certain people to fish, they will sink the boat if you don't go with them; and if you do go with them, they will quickly piss off Moby Dick.

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Thanks all you guys. I did have a followup question that should have been more explicit. Most of it I know how to access, but she wants to recover her emailing contact list from Thunderbird.

For that, assuming the drive is still good, Thunderbird (she calls it Mazolla) would have to be running to create the export. I'm not sure of the best way to do that- install Thunderbird on her win10 Acer and then substitute in her old data file? Try running her old version of Thunderbird directly from the USB'd old drive?

[redwudz]

I use Start10 for all my W10 PCs to get back to the W7 menus. It makes it much easier for me as all my other PCs run W7 and one runs XP.
I don't feel comfortable with the W10 interface since I don't have a touchscreen PC.

Just a suggestion.... And good luck with the drive recovery.