There's a pretty simply solution that will continue to benefit you sir. buy yourself a USB caddy for your old hard drive.
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Here, depending on the interface (IDE or SATA), simply buy the right product, when it comes wire it in (it's as easy as plugging in the power and data cables into the HDD caddies interface), power it up, plug the now enclosed HDD's USB wire into the computer and BAM! new external hard drive.
External, but not portable, HDD caddies/enclosures are notorious for being bulky and can be a burden for a laptop user, still it makes a great backup device once you have recovered your files from it and formatted it.
Hope this helps!
Ex
