Converting an Internal Sata Hard Drive to External Hard Drive

My desktop died and I would like to convert it's hard drive to an external hard drive so that I can retrieve files that are on it. It has Windows XP Home SP3 installed as the OS. We purchased a new desktop with Windows 7 as the OS. I know that I would need to purchase a cover that is compatible with the Sata drive. My question is, if I make this hard drive an external hard drive, am I going to run into problems since it has Windows XP installed on it and will I be able to retrieve my files that I need. I do have some of these files on floppy, but now, I don't have a floppy drive to read them.

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
cckheath

 

Thank you for the information. It has helped me alot.

 

Your mention of having some of your files on floppy has me wondering how old the hard disk is. It may be a parallel drive, not serial. Parallel drives have a two-inch-wide data cable with a forty-pin connector.

Your choice of enclosure must be compatible with your drive.

 

We had a floppy in the computer at my request. The computer was custom made to my specs and was approximately 5 years old and one morning it just died. I'm thinking that the motherboard died because when it was turned on, nothing happened, it was dead. I have the hard drive out of the system and it's a Maxtor DiamondMax 17. 160 gb Sata 3.0Gb HDD. 3.5 series.

 

Did you have the Power Supply checked?

 

The power supply was replaced about a year ago.

 

Did you have it checked? It is like everything else. I have seen them fail within a week and I have a couple of old PC's that are about 16 years old and they still work great. Grandkids play a couple of games on them is the only reason I keep them around. They have the original PS in them.

 

No I didn't. I am assuming that the motherboard went out and I just didn't want to spend the money to have it repaired as things where starting to die on it. 1st the card reader died, then the floppy drive died, then it wouldn't boot unless we pressed F2 to boot. It was just one thing after another. I think the only things that might be still good on it is the RW DVD-CD roms. It has 2 which are basicially new and a 3rd that came out of a previous computer. Not sure if I'm wasting my time to build an external hard drive or just talk to a friend and copy the floppys to cd so that I can retrieve the card file from Windows 3.1 and an address book that has most of our addresses and phone numbers. Our really important files where backed up.

 

Yeah, sometimes what you are doing is better. The floppy takes power to run from the PS. You could just unplug the power from the floppy and use one of the power from the CD/DVD to check the floppy. That would be a good way to check the PS.
If you got it to boot back up, the first thing I would check is the date and time. Could be the CMOS battery gone bad.