Getting a Slave drive to work

[NLitton]

An old computer died on me, and I need to access something on its hard drive.

When starting it up I can hear the HD spinning. I have tried connecting it to a working computer and changed to jumper setting to slave. When starting up, it asks for a boot disk, and I provide one but it doesn’t help any. If you have any suggestions about getting the computer working with the new HD they would be helpful. I am not sure if the HD is at fault thought.

Thanks for your time

 

[diogenes10]

I'm making two assumptions with the following suggestion
1) There was already a hard drive in the working computer.
2) You put the slave harddrive on the same cable with that harddrive.

Did you check the jumper setting on the original harddrive?
I'm used to old WD drives-on those if they are the only drive, the jumper is in a park position, but if you add a second drive, you have to move the jumper on the original drive to master, as well as setting the new drive to slave.
Maybe your original drive is similar and it needs a new jumper setting too. If that doesn't work, try putting the "problem" drive as primary on the second ide port and change its jumper to master or parked position as appropriate.

 

[SweetRyd]

Firstly, who is the manufacturer of the Hard Drive in Question? For example if it was a Western Digital, I would suggest visiting the Western Digital Support Site, they have a wide Varity of Technical Specifications regarding how and where your Jumper/shunt should be placed.
Here is a direct link to Western Digitals Hard Drive resource page:

http://support.wdc.com/productspec.asp

(This is only a suggestion, but if your manufacturer differs, then refers to the appropriate Support site). Before visiting the page, be sure to have your hard drive model number handy, you will only need the first eight digits of your model number (located on the hard drive case). Once you have located the specifications of the hard drive in question you can ascertain your required IDE connection & Jumper configuration for both Master and Slave drives in that working Computer you mentioned. I would recommend that you have the working computer's Hard drive set as Dual (Master) and the Hard drive you wish to recover Data from as the Dual (Slave). Keeping in mind the whole time that you will have to set the jumper for the Master drive according to it's manufacture's specification.