Thanks for your reply. I seem to be making some progress - I took the external drive into work today, a computer boffin opened it up, & said the internal connections are the same as standard drives nowadays. Sooo, looks like I can buy something like this
http://www.amazon.co.uk/3-5-External...1629854&sr=8-1 open up my external drive, unplug & remove the actual drive, plug it into the new caddy, then it can be plugged into my Mac or pc laptop via USB. Boffin did mention mine is probably an IDE, which the one on Amazon also mentions.
Your comments.. SCSI ID numbers, is the drive terminated ... sorry, means nothing to me but none of the Quadra stuff had been moved/unplugged - just left alone in the corner of the spare bedroom to gather dust. The SCSI to USB adapter, I did see some on eBay but the SCSI end looked the opposite if what I would need, meaning this one
http://cgi.ebay.com/USB-to-SCSI-Adap...QQcmdZViewItem has an identical socket to the one on the back of my external drive.
One question you can hopefully answer while I'm here - I'm not sure what version of OS is on my Quadra but it's about 11 years old. I see the above caddy is OS 9.x/X compatible. I would only need to copy over stuff like letters, jpgs etc, no software. If the OS of the Quadra is below OS 9 would all the data I want to copy over from the external drive be readable on the iBook? I should think so. Another question while I'm here. The letters I have on my Quadra are in PageMaker, not Word. (please don't laugh, but I really liked it). Should I be able to open them in Word on my iBook?
Thanks for your help, I really appreciate it.