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Plase help!

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amcfsu

Technical User
Aug 9, 2003
3
US
I need to back up my old laptop drive to me desktop. I have it running on the master IDE that was used for the CD-rom since it wouldn't recognize it as a slave to my desktop hard drive. Bios sees the laptop hard drive but when I boot the computer windows ME does not recognize it at all. How can I see the drive to obtain the nescessary files? What am I doing wrong?

Thanks!
 
They sell this little adapter that you can use to hook up the laptop harddrive directly to your desktop. Then you can copy the files over. I don't know the exact name, but it was talked about in a PC World magazine in one of the issues from the last three or so months.
 
I have it hooked t the desktop through the IDE cable using the 2.5" to 3.5" adaptor. Are you talking about something different?
 
Howdy:

A hard-drive is an IDE device and has to be hooked to an IDE port.. the floppy port won't cut it.. You need the adapter as mentioned above.

Murray
 
The IDE port I have it hooked to goes directly to the motherboard as a master. I don't see another way to attach it to the motherboard without running it as a slave on my desktop hard drive ide cable. Running it as a slave did not work. The floppy drive is not involved. Could you be more specific in your answer?
 
1. Jumper issues.

All IDE drives require proper master / slave / cable select jumper settings.

Some hard disk drives require a bit more. If connected as a slave, the Master hard disk may well require a jumper setting that says it is a Master in a dual drive configuration. If the Master is Cable select, then as a slave you would have to be Cable Select as well.

On the secondary IDE chain, as you say you are doing, it the drive needs to be set as Master, or if the cable type is the 80 conductor type, it needs to be set for Cable Select using the last connector.

Does this help any? The Web sites for the hard disk manufacturer's have good on-line diagrams of the needed jumper settings if they are not printed on a label on the drive itself.

Finally, it is the case that a drive formatted with one chipset controller type may, may not be readable when used with a controller based on a different chipset.

Most of the hard disk recovery utilities can read the disk in this instance. GetDataBack is well mentioned in this Forum, a test of whether the data can be recovered with a sofware utility can be done (freeware) from this site:
Restorer 2000
 
You haven't said what the target system OS might be.

It sounds like you have done everything right as far as the hardware is concerned.

In order for an OS to recognize a hard drive it must be fdisked and formatted with a compatible file system. There are other issues that can haunt you , but for now I would suspect that you have some sort of compatiblility issue, like a disk drive overlay or a later OS with a later media descriptor.

Sometimes you can figure out the problem by running fdisk and looking at the partition table on the 2nd drive. If no partition found you can suspect an overlay. If nonDOS you can suspect a later type partition.

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
 
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