Question : How do I know I'm connecting my 2.5" laptop IDE connector right other than trial and error (error being destroy the drive)?

I have a 2.5" IDE to USB adapter, but the 2.5" connector is NOT KEYED. I can't tell if I'm connecting it upside down or not. Is that bad? Hell yes it's bad if you're using a 2.5" IDE/ATA (PATA) connector. For those of you who don't know, 2 of the pins in the laptop version of old-school ATA connector (or PATA as you kids now call it) actually carry the 5 volts of electricity to power the darn thing. Would you connect 5 volts to a random pin on an old hard drive? If you wanted the hard drives owner to sue you, sure. Otherwise I don't recommend it.

But now I'm stuck not being able to get data off this drive short of buying an old laptop to plug this into and copying the data to CD-R or floppy or cassette tape or whatever the old clunker supports.

Is there a trick to this? Do I need to grab a multimeter and poke around in the various little square holes? Please let me know what you think. I'll try to be mindful when "accepting as a solution" (even if there isn't one) so people get the right amount of ponts.

http://forum.tt-hardware.com/fichiers/uploads/upload_14_1/ide44pinout.gif
 

ide44pinout.gif (8 KB) (File Type Details) 

44 pin 2.5" IDE/PATA connector (at least according to this forum)

Answer : How do I know I'm connecting my 2.5" laptop IDE connector right other than trial and error (error being destroy the drive)?

Are the two servers on the same domain/forrest? if they are not ther is no way of doing what you are trying to do.

Unless the servers are on the same domain (or can speak to each other via a trust etc) the ACL's will be meaningless on the other server. Even if you have re-created the users with the same names the ACL's will not link to the new users as the SID for the newly created user will be different to the SID on the file you have copied.