I have some old hard drives that have been in towers and laptops stored away. Some of these go back to before USB and cover several different flavors of Linux. None were ever external drives.

I need to search these drives for some tapes I transfers years ago.

Is there a simple way to do this or a website that could step me through it? Willing so sort of hold my hand?

Thanks for any help you can give.

What relevance is this ?. Are you trying to read these on a laptop ?.

Regardless, external enclosures are the easiest for this sort of thing, although getting one with an IDE connector might be a bit more difficult these days. I keep several for just this sort of thing - IDE, SATA, laptop drives, and even recently had to buy an mSATA to rescue a SSD.
Always handy to have. Just plug your drive in (and external power - much more stable then USB delivered) and connect to USB. Couldn't be easier.

Of course you can always plug them into a standard tower (if you have the connectors), but that is a lot more work.

Had similar once. Tossed it in the bin. May be better these days, but on my experience I couldn't recommend it.

FWIW, I just got an adapter that you mount on an IDE drive and can then plug it into an external sata drive dock, which may be easier to work with than an external IDE enclosure.

If your old drives are real old, pre-IDE, you'll probably need to build a vintage system with the appropriate MFM/RLL/ESDI/SCSI controller.

As long as they are ide almost any modern usb to ide gizmo plus power will do. I see them on sale for maybe $10-$20.

If they are MFM or RLL then you may have to work on it in a real system using the old bios numbers.

If they have been in a secure box they may be great but any sort of bottom of drawer deal.....

Thanks to every for replying.

I found the files I was looking for om my website. I had put them there about 10 years ago and forgot that I had.