Faulty Hard Drive Issues

[G5K]

Hey

My computer broke a couple of weeks ago. after having bought a load of new parts, i.e. motherboard and hard drive for it, i got it up and running again. I had a load of information, for example documents and music, that i wanted to keep from the old hard disk, so i am wondering how i can get them onto the new hard drive.

here is the twist: I have tried setting it up in the Master slave fashion, but the BIOS can not detect either hard drive when i install the old one, but when i disconnect it and restart, the computer detects the new one fine.

When i was trying to fix the computer before buying the new hard drive, i was able to get into the install windows XP pro screen (The one you get to when booting up) but it wouldnt let me install it on two partitions due to "errors on partition". These two partitions had been apparently formatted during me fixing it (i.e. free space on the partition = total space of partition). The E: and G: drive however seemed to be fine.

I am beginning to think that i definately won't get anything back from it, but i thought i'd ask see if anyone knew if i can get my stuff off of it.

thank you for your time

 

[wolluf]

Does sound like old drive is dead. Is it recognised in the bios if you connect it on its own? Have you access to another machine to try it in? Obviously, if you can't get any machine to recognise it, your data isn't coming back (you'd need one of the expensive data recovery agencies to retrieve it from the actual platters in the drive).

 

[G5K]

Thank you for the reply.

i have got it to work a couple of times on its own, but not when there is another hard drive in it. I have also tried it in other machines, but still no luck.

good job i only just backed up all the really important documents i guess..

 

[garebo]

What is the make of the drive? Western digital drives have different jumper settings for when the drive is by itself, another for when the drive is with another western digital drive, and yet another jumper setting for when the drive is with another make of drive. Some other drives or models of drives could have that issue as well, not sure on that, but i know that western digital has that issue.
You could also try cable select.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[G5K]

I had a Quantum fireball plus AS and bought a Samsung one. I tried putting both on cable select, but nothing. One thing that i found a little odd is when i put the old hard drive in, niether of my CD drives would be recognised either.. They are seperate to the hard drive IDE cable.

 

[wolluf]

Dead/dying drives can sometimes have that effect.

If you can get it to be recognised on its own, you could try booting from a win98 boot floppy (with something like ntfsdos from

http://www.sysinternals.com

if the filestore is ntfs) to see what's accessible (you could also copy small amounts of data to floppy, if anything visible - though this probably not much use).

Or - if you have a copy of ghost and machine has CD writer, could make a ghost boot floppy with CD writer support and see if it would allow you to clone the partitions to CD.

But suspect you'll just have to bin it!