I have a number of external USB drives as well as probably every internal IDE hard drive rive from every computer I’ve had for the last 30 years. Lately I have been trying to collate all of that data into a single archive so that I can be more organized with it and not have so many drives sitting around. There is a lot of duplication across the drives that I am sifting through. But my main issue is that I can’t read some of the older IDE drives. Most of them are from Windows based machines going back to Win95. A few are from Linux machines. So they do have different file system structures on them. I mostly have Macs now but also have a laptop with Windows 7 on it that I can use to try to read the drives.
Some of the drives show up as being active when connected to a computer but I can’t get results on what is on any partitions. Even seeing how they are formatted doesn’t show up. Are there any tools available that will help do some forensics on these drives so that I can determine if it is still possible to get data off of them? Any recommendations for how to retrieve data from such old drives? Do current versions of MacOS or Windows even support reading from IDE drives that are more than 20 years old?