Community Newsletter: Q&A forum: 6/10/05 Trouble accessing old hard drive in new computer

Everything Miguel stated is excellent advice. I am only adding on a note of caution re: the idea of copying the old hard drive's files to the new system. They might contain viruses, worms, etc., that could have caused the original perceived "death" of the first drive. What is missing here is that original status report about that "death".

oh by the way, i had just thought of something. depending on the hd, u can use the software for it, like maxtor powermax, dataguard for westerndigital, and seagate has it own. u can only access these programs thru a bootable floppy when u dl the files from their own website, or make a bootable cd with their iso, if any applicable.

from within the software u can test it thru many test.
90% of mine drives are maxtor, with a few wd and two seagates.
I just thought i would throw out that information for you and anyone to use.

later comier957

No it wouldn't. I know because on all of my own computers I have put the Windows OS on both Master and slave on IDE and have not had any problem. Especially on brand new virgin drives. When I format the slave, I format it with the system files (which makes it boot able if need be) included. Then I set up the BIOS (especially the newer main/motherboards) to look at "C" drive, then the "CD" drive, then "D" drive. If everything is all right it should boot up on one of those. So to answer the question, it would not matter even if the second drive was formatted with the system files, there should not be a problem.

Hope this helps, Rick

http://www.rickswebfactory.com/

the most likely cause (to my simple mind) is that it was not the old computer that died but the hard drive!
I had exactly the same problem with a friends computer when his died and I tried to recover software from it - disk manager saw it but would only allow formt.

I came to the conclusion that as it was a FAT32 drive (though on XP home) the most likely cause was the lost of the File Allocation Table or corruption of the same. Dont take it to a shop!!! if you are confident enough to install it in the first place download file scavenger trial version and run it to see what it could recover. If it brings up thousands of files then you are in business if not the the corruption may be at some lower level then I have ever sunk to. There is nothing to lose as the demo is free.

If it reports that it can recover then you can either fork out the $40 or so for the programme OR you can scout places like www.source-forge.net for an open source free solution (it should work but will be more complicated to use.

As a last resort - only if the data is really vital - it is possible to rent the kind of software the professional file recovery firms use. again I cant remember the source but I am sure someone will tell you and you can download a trial first - I once recoered 800 important files from a drive which had been re-partitioned, reformatted and had windows XP re-installed - three times. I reckon it reovered about 75% of the data from an 60gb hard drive

Whats the moral of this story? buy a nice large USB external drive and back up all your data every week at least - that way you could just reformat a dodgy drive and be up and running in an afternoon

While Compaq is easily the worst offender in the 'secret handshake' catagory of engineered incompatibility other vendors such as Sun do it also.

I solved it by changing BIOS to chose start-up of old brive (set up last as master and last in cable)
I'm used to MAC where I have both drives on my finder at all times. Is this going to be posible with my HP PC ? Do I have to change BIOS everytime I chose to use the other drive ?

How would the scenario play out if the old hard drive is an external drive connected via USB?

Jumper and cable problems would not occur; but how would you make sure to get at the data on the new PC?

When attempting to install a non-Cable select drive in a Cable select system that drive often must be jumpered as slave. This might help.

Unfortunitely most often when a system cannot access data on a drive that it seems its a problem with the drive. For the OS to see the drive it jumpers normally have to be in an acceptiable configuration. More often, when the jumpers are wrong either the drive is not listed in drive manager or if it is listed you can access it but the system is erratic or crashes on disk access. I suspect that the problem with access is due to drive failure rather than configuration.

Miguel,

That is without a doubt the best advice for this type of common occurrence I have ever read. You are to be commended for the time and effort that it took to formulate such a great response!

John

I think you have it wrong. Even if the new system is set up for and formatted for NTFS on the new drive in the new computer, you should still be able to see FAT16 and FAT32 files. It is just that XP will not save data in the FAT configuration until the second drive is converted to NTFS. There are reasons to keep the FAT format;

If you have a home network and these are still using the older "Windows" OS. This allows the other machines to use and access one another's computer (even the newer XP should be set up for the FAT format.

If you are going to be compatible with older machines when transferring applications or data from medium to medium (floppy disk, removable drive, USB Flash drives, so on so forth).

Hope this helps, Rick

http://www.rickswebfactory.com/

larger hard drives installed in older Win9x systems typically required one of two techniques to be usable:

- partitioning into two or more smaller logical drives
- sector translation software installed in the boot sector of the drive

WinXP has no problems with the first item; it can have major issues with the second item.

A rough description of sector translation software is that two partitions are created on the drive. A teeny partition is the boot partition containing code that loads under the operating system. Win9x can't even see it. This code then interprets all BIOS/OS requests for data read/writes and invisibly reaches into the large second partition to handle the chore.

In most cases, this makes the data on the large partition unreadable unless accessed through the sector translator. You can check with the drive manufacturer, but I think in most cases, the only fix is to put the drive into the system as the boot drive, boot the PC (and you may have hardware driver issues to deal with if it's not the original PC), transfer all the data to some other media, move the drive into the intended secondary position in the new XinXP machine, format the drive, and FINALLY move all the data back on to the drive.

Just a couple of things to add to Miguel's great answer.

If you are using cable select for designating which hard drive is the boot drive, you will need to set the jumpers on the hard drives to that setting. Most hard drives have 3 jumper positions; MA for master, SL for slave and CS for cable select. If you are using cable select, set the jumper on both hard drives to CS. Otherwise, the hard disk that came with your new computer should be set to MA and the old hard drive to SL. To test your old hard drive, you might want to set it as the master and run it alone on your new computer. If your new computer exhibits the same problem as the old computer that died, then you have found why it died. Which means it didn't die, but the hard drive had failures that should warrant more investigation.

Orient the IDE cable correctly. The cable has a red stripe on one side that indicates pin 1 that needs to connect to pin 1 of the hard drive connector, which is ''usually'' on the side of the IDE connector that points towards the power connector. Again, refer to the hard drive's manufacturer's web site for accurate info on these things.

Though Miguel did an excellent job, I notice he did not mention the possibility of a virus having caused problems with the boot sector of your old hard drive. Doing a thorough scan with updated signatures can help here.

If you still cannot access your old hard drive, I have found a nifty way of doing that with a Linux boot CD. It can be found at http://www.knoppix.org/. Go to the download link at the bottom and download the latest version. It will be an iso file. Then burn it to a CD and reboot your computer with it in the CD drive. Make sure your BIOS is set to boot up from a CD and that it is set before your hard disk. This will run a Linux OS directly from the CD without making any changes to your OS on your hard disk. You ''should'' be able to access both hard disks and then transfer whatever you want from the old to the new. Hope this helps.

another way is to get an external enclosure 3.5 or 5.5? inch and install the drive as directed. this will help you move files between work and home.

So far I have read really good advice: jumpers, bios, virus, etc. Assuming you have checked all of this, the problem mostly lies in the data XP writes to the hard drive in MRB (master boot record). Once widows set this as C: with the OS on it, becomes almost impossible to redo. Most drive manufacturers have a downloadable solution, which you must use to alter this. Warning, if it fails the drive will be mostly useless. I have had both good & bad results on many drives. The easiest solution to this is to send the drive to the maker & let them fix it.

The real meat in the sandwich here is that you want to recover the data.

The suggestions about making it an external usb hook up is best for this purpose & won't require screwing up the MRB. Just one catch, since the old drive has an OS on it, your pc may try to fire up the usb init as the main OS first. This is easily worked around by not plugging in the usb until your pc is up & running off the new system. At that point XP will simply show the drive & all of it's contents as the next available drive letter. Copy the data to your new hard drive or burn the data to cd or dvd.

Now the part that threw me for a loop at first was that I forgot to unplug the external drive on reboot & the bios complained & would not boot up. lol
All you need to do is unplug the external & reboot & your good to go. Reformatting the new external is no problem, but, the MRB will still think it should be the main OS. You can use the new external for an extra drive by plugging & unplugging the usb when needed.

Win XP has a hissy fit if you inplug the usb while the main system is up & running. Work around this by simply unplygging it between reboots.

If you don't have the $ or the desire to make the old drive an external one, & you have the jumpers set right ( & a cable to allow 2 hard drives to be attached ) you can simply lpug in the cable y=to the old hd after your new sys is up & copy the data that way ( Ihave done this many times as well). Just be very careful to be grounded & not cause a static shock to anything.

Hope this helps you.

If the old hard drive was installed with a translating bios it might cause this kind of problem. Kill the translating bios with an fdisk /mbr command if I recall correctly.