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General discussion

Dead Hard Drive - need my stuff

Mar 17, 2005 1:12AM PST

I saved a couple of hard drives from years past that went bad. I'm interested in seeing what's on them now. All of them have an OS loaded and none of them will hook up to my PC. I have another thread running for a similar problem with a good hard drive but here's the specifics:

P4 Windows XP Pro PC, 512MB, 200GB IDE hard disks, 80 wire IDE cables.
One of the drives I want to explore is a 60GB Quantum that's 4 years old and was determined to be dead by a local PC shop.
The other is a 6 GB IBM drive that's at least 7 years old.

Set the jumpers into the Slave Position, hook up to IDE cable, connect power, start PC . . . my PC won't load Windows with the corrupt drives connected to it.

Is there a simple way of getting the data off these drives that I haven't figured out. Am I attempting the impossible? What am I doing wrong.

And another question, lets say my new (Primary)HDD goes bad later on and Windows won't load, etc. Is there a way that I can recover what is on the drive without having to take it to a shop?

Thanks for the help

Matt

Discussion is locked

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Doesn't 80 conductor cables use CS?
Mar 17, 2005 1:19AM PST
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So maybe I was just unlucky . . .?
Mar 17, 2005 3:00AM PST

I use 80 counductor IDE cables and always hooked the 2nd drive up on the second channel. Or maybe I thought I had the right channel but didn't. Thanks for the link. Any tips on how to get data off a corrupt drive (for the home user?)

Po

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Try this...
Mar 18, 2005 7:24AM PST

Try the Knoppnix live CD, which boots from a bootable CD and then under Linix, you can access the HDs to retrieve data, provided they at least spin-up. Don't let the Linix side of this worry you, you'll get the drift once you work with it. Plus, the .ISO file that makes the live CD is free, just burn the image to get a bootable CD. Here's a link that may help also: http://www.dougknox.com/

PLus, you can try under XP, use the "repair OS" within the XP CD, bes ure what you want to do and save any data if you can before hand.

enjoy -----Willy Happy