how to mount and identify "mystery" hard drives and data on those hard drives?

I work on upgrading and identifying hard drives. Upgrading is a matter of going from a small drive to a larger one. This task is easy, as I just use a cloning utility like True Image.

What I need help with is identifying basic info on each drive within a box of "mystery" hard drives.

I call them "mystery" hard drives because I have no idea where they came from, who the end user was, what the workstations network name was, what it's IP address was, which network the workstation was on, which OS they had, etc. I have like 40 hard drives that someone gave to me.

I tried just installing some of the drives into a basic core 2 quad test bed motherboard, but had all sorts of problems and issues. This was due to the fact that the hard drives had existed in a PC with different hardware/drivers/CPU and such.

I was thinking that a software solution might be a better way to approach this.

I then considered whether I should convert each hard drive into either an ISO or an image file.

Then mount the ISO/image file and see what is on that "mounted drive image".

I have taken some computer forensic classes and I am thinking the easiest way to go is to use a forensic software program like:

1. Mount image pro by Get Data

2. VFC by Get Data

3. encase forensic software

4. access data forensic software

5. Helix Pro

The only one I have is the Helix product. The other programs start at $299 (mount image) and go into the thousands of dollars. More than I can afford.

I'm thinking that there must be some "free tools" like Backtrack or Knoppix (or ?) that could turn a hard drives data into a common type of "mountable image" file.

I would love to know how other people have approached this type of problem and have resolved it.

I'm assuming someone in the computer forensics community would know how to best approach this. I suspect some of these folks have probably come up against hard drives that came from a non-working laptop or desktop. But yet they needed to access it's data without having to buy a PC that was identical to the one the hard drive came out of.