If your hard drive seemed fine before the system died then it’s probably OK. Motherboards, power supplies, microprocessors and memory can fail in the blink of an eye, but hard drives usually become flaky, make strange sounds or exhibit other errors before they die. If your old computer was working fine and then died all of a sudden, the hard drive is most likely fine. The first thing you should do before investing any time and money in an old hard drive is to try to determine if it’s ok. The same thing can be done if you install a larger hard drive in your computer and don’t know what to do with the old one.
If a computer dies for any reason other than a dead hard drive, you can always convert the old drive into an external unit, and grab important files off the drive in the process. But what can you do with the old carcass?
It’s quite common to have an old computer die on you and not have it repaired, especially if it’s more than a few years old.
