I have several old hard drives, ATA interface, from long dead 32bit laptops. Today, I bought an external USB drive bay to see if I could recover files from those old drives.
:nana: The emoji says it all.

I was able to move files from the old drive to the internal drive on my 64bit system.

Not only was I able to see all my old files, but I discovered that, if I boot with the drive bay turned on, 64bit hardware (see my signature) will BOOT from 32bit software (Kubuntu 14.04). This was unexpected and I am impressed.

My THANKS to the devs who made this possible.