Present XP NTFS as Slave

[Peahippo]

Well, there are things you know, and things you know and have also done. Here's something I haven't done yet:

I have a 10-20GB IDE drive in a Dell GX260. The XP on the drive is corrupted or something, and it won't network. I have to grab about 100MB of user data files off of it.

So, I was thinking that I'd:

1. Boot from floppy and use part.exe to mark partition non-active.
2. Jumper it slave.
3. Put it into another GX machine of the same class (we use GX 240, 260 and 270), making sure the primary drive is jumpered master (and not just "single&quot.
4. Boot the master HDD and let it find and connect the slave HDD as D: or something. This boot will be network capable.
5. Copy files from the slave drive to the network using my tech permissions.

This is what I would do with drives before NTFS and XP, but now I'm not so sure. Is this the way to do it?

 

[wolluf]

sounds ok to me (don't need to mark partition non-active if you make it slave - other disk will boot).

 

[kewlcoder]

sounds funny,
i would say don't make any aprtitions.. you will spoil it
because once the partitions are done there are chances the drive might not be acceptable at all.. because it needs fromating etc....
and yeah...
just connect it to another machine and run it in slave mode it will work excellent.. copy it and then download a copy of Disk wizard from somewhere and make a boot disk and if there is nothing you need in the hard drive any more then ..... boot from that boot- disk you made and run ZERO FILL --- no harm in doingit at all.

 

[Peahippo]

What I actually did was:

1) Ignore the partitioning for now.
2) Jumper it master for 2nd IDE bus.
3) Put into same class of machine, as 1st drive on 2nd bus.
4) Boot ... and then the problems started.

The BIOS led me to believe it would autodetect. It didn't, but with some settings changes I finally managed to get it to detect the 2nd drive. Chalk that up to unfamiliarity.

Booted into WinXP with my tech login. Looked at the drives ... hmm, the only other hard disk to appear was a FAT32 partition about 1GB in size. The drive I added was 20GB. The NTFS partition wasn't there.

Snarling, I booted as the machine's Administrator. That did the trick. I can see now that our standard builds make a FAT32 partition for WinXP source files, and an NTFS partition for the rest. Hence, I could now see a 39GB main "drive" with NTFS, a 1GB FAT32 partition, and finally another NTFS partition with all the data I was trying to get access to in the first place. (Of course, the FAT32 1GB partition on the primary drive is hidden in this view ... for some blasted reason.)

This whole even reminds me of the coming DRM changes in our accursed Microsoft experience. I am coming to loathe the restrictions imposed by NT and XP ... and it's just going to get worse. I'm never sure anymore what the hell I'm looking at, since the layers of abstraction between myself and the hardware are being added with every OS version upgrade.

Now it is prayer time, and I must get on my rug and bow in the direction of Linus Torvald's home. :^)