Take the failing drive out. On the back will be a jumper setting called slave. Set it as slave. Place the drive into a working machine and boot the working machine. Not as the only drive, but add it to the ribbon cable. The failing drive will show up as a new drive and can be accessed. Maybe. If so you can copy all your ''stuff'' to the working drive or CD or DVD.
Wayne
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"Dead" Hard Drive Back to Life by 'Slave '?
(Please read all of the below! Thanks!)
Hi. I have an HP Media Center Computer model m7077c and it came with a 200GB hard drive and i make my own movies and movies and DVD's for other people and have loads of other stuff like pictures(LOT'S of them), music, files, programs and more! And then recently when i start the computer a message in white says something like "Please chose boot device" or like "Boot device unavailable, chose another" or something like that. I have tried everything, and there were no CD's,DVD's,Memory cards or anything else connected!. I called HP and i have spent over 3 hours on the phone with them tryig to figure out the problem. They told me to switch my dad's and my computer's hard drives around to see if it was the computer and not the hard drive. When i switched them around, my dad's computer wouldn't load and had the messag whil my computer had everything of my dad's since i switched. HP told me then that the hard drive ahd a major problem and was somewhat dead. But then they told me that there is an option called "Slave" or something like that and they said if i like get a new hard drive, i can still save my old "dead" one by zapping out the contents by using slave. Can anyone PLEASE help me in clarifying this or just plain helping me out! I have 200GB of precious family memories and more! ANY help would be totally awesome! Thanks!
-9AllenW9
I posted this also under a wrong section.

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