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Randy The Tech Professor

August 1, 2011 at 2:43 pm

Computer Repair Tools That I Can’t Live Without (Part 2: USB Drive Adapter)

Hello everybody,

In part 1 of this series I talked about my four favorite junk file cleaners. In this post I would like to tell you about a tool that literally changed my computer repair life: A USB 2.0 to IDE or SATA Drive Adapter.

This tool is absolutely “the bees knees”, and I can’t live without it. Here’s why:

1) Lets say that I get a severely infected computer. The computer is so infected that I can’t even boot up the machine into safe mode. The infection has basically rendered the computer useless, and I’ll get nowhere if I keep trying to work on an infected hard drive in an infected computer. What to do?

I take the infected hard drive out of the infected machine and attach it (through the USB Drive Adapter) to a known, good working machine and then do the malware/virus scans. The Drive Adapter allows me to do this by turning any IDE or SATA drive into an external one. Once I have finished doing scans with my antivirus tools, I just put the hard drive back into the original machine and at this point I’m usually able to boot up the computer and continue with the malware removal in normal mode.

2) Let’s say that I get a computer that has a motherboard problem and is “dead as a doornail”. The computer obviously won’t boot up, but the hard drive is still good and stills contains all of the precious data. How do I retrieve my clients data?

Once again, I just take the drive out of the dead machine and hook it up to my good working machine by using the USB Drive Adapter. The drive shows up as an external drive and I simply transfer all files from that drive to my computer. Once I have the defective computer fixed I can restore these files at any time. If my client wants to buy a new computer, I’ll restore the files to the new hard drive and then use the hard drive from the original machine as a permanent external drive.

Now do you see why it’s a repair tool that I can’t live without?

Professor Randy says: By externally connecting any hard drive via USB, you will be able to accomplish various repair/backup tasks with ease. You’re going to love this tool!

 

 

 

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3
  • DICK SHILLING
    11:29 pm on April 16th, 2012 1

    Hi Randy, I was at your PC presentation tonight and it was great. I have been looking through your site trying to get courage to start to clean up my vista machine.
    one question, in my email file using windows mail 2, the list of files on the right corner where you save mail to has disappeared. How do I get it back up.
    Thanks Dick

  • Alson Tan
    7:46 pm on November 21st, 2017 2

    Good morning Randy, I am Alson from Singapore. My problem is when I want to delete email from windows, every time it will hang after I select the message to delete and I need to close the window mail program and restart it. Would appreciate that you can let me know what is the problem and thanks for your kind attention

    Thank you.
    Alson

  • Randy Knowles
    11:18 pm on November 24th, 2017 3

    Hello Alson,
    Good to hear from you. What email client (program) are you using?
    Best wishes,
    Randy

 

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