So, the Ebay seller sent me the wrong model of the laptop I requested. This will take days or week to get it sorted. In the meantime, I need to get some data from the old HDD into my smartphone.
I know for sure the phone will not be powerful enough to power the old drive through a USB caddy.
Are there caddies that allow two USB connections, one from the drive to the micro USB port, the other to a USB charger?
There are docking caddys that you put the drive into which have a plug pack power supply.
It used to be common to have USB leads with two type A plugs on for just this purpose - not seen it for a while.
The "proper" way to power a higher power device is using a powered hub.
You can also get caddies / docking stations with their own PSU and power in connector.
You could also connect the caddy to a computer, and then share the drive on that, and access it over wifi from the phone.
An alternative if you have an android smart phone* and both your phone and computer are on your home network.
Install a ftp client on your phone Swiftftp
On your computer start up a ftp program such as FileZilla host = xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (the IP number of your phone) it seems to work without putting ftp:// in front of the IP number. port = 2121 login type = normal user = the user name you've just set up on the phone password = the password you've just set up on your phone
Once connected you can transfer data both ways between the computer and phone.
With android it ought to be even simpler...
Plug phone into computer with USB lead.
Go to settings->Connected Devices->USB
Under "Use USB for", select File transfer.
The phones storage will now appear as a browsable external drive in windows. Drag and drop files to it as you fancy.
(plug your HDD into another USB port to move files directly between the two)
(Depending on how the Andorid vendor has skinned or customised then OS, the process might be different from above which is fairly "stock" android)
For iThings, you would need to connect the HDD to a computer and share it on the network there. Recent iThings can mount network SMB / CIFS shares, and so access the drive directly then.
What everyone is missing is that the OP's laptop is not functional, this info was in a previous post not in this thread. Suggestions involving using the laptop are thus a non-starter.
Yes, this is rather implied in this post by him using the term HDD, rather than laptop/computer, and saying that he needed to power the HDD.
The data recovery process will work with any laptop or desktop - it does not need to be a particular one!
So he can use another computer - even if he needs to borrow some time on someone else's.
Are there any restrictions moving types and size of photos from PC to, say a MotoG31 phone ?.
There are 'Y' cables.
Also check if your phone supports OTG mode.
The native filing system on android is YAFFS - so no intrinsic limitations on file size that are going to matter.
The apps installed may not be able to display all file types, but the phone can still store the files.
Difficult if HDD is 500GB+.
These do the job:
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