Well it happened again. Home computer crashed and no backup. graemlins/clonk.gif When will I learn? I lost everything, email and addresses, favorites, pics, legal stuff etc. I snuck in here at work to type this. I should get a new system this weekend, and someone told me I can link my corrupt hard drive into the new system and recover the info. The drive works but Windows is corrupt. Tries to load and then defaults to the C prompt. Time for an upgrade anyway. (Win 98). I read the site everyday at work when I can, and just took a chance to write. I will have to wait for my home system to be back. Any help? I really need the info off my drive. Thanks.

Tom,
You should be able to "slave" the old drive into the new computer.

Right now, it's set as the "master" in your computer. There should be a set of pins on it where the power and signal cables plug in that are jumpered, making it the 'master'. On the label on the drive, there'll be a table showing you where to move the jumper to in order to make it a 'slave'.

You can add it to the same cable that the new computers hard drive is on, or the secondary channel cable, which is probably going to a CDROM drive or whatever. If the new computer has it's hard drive and a CDROM\DVD drive on the same cable, the hard drive will be the 'master' and the CDROM or DVD will be set as 'slave'. You can then just leave the old hard drive set as 'master' and cable it into the secondary side. You might need to use the signal cable from the old computer.

If all goes well and the old hard drive isn't too corrupt, the new computer should see it as drive E or F, depending on how many other 'drives' are in the new computer.

Do yourself a favor.... buy a CDROM writer\burner or a DVD writer\burner for the new computer. It only takes a couple minutes to burn a few hundred megs of data and save it for disaster recovery. A decent DVD burner will create a data disk a lot faster than a CDROM burner.

Once you get a new computer and depending on how much data you have to back up, a convenient and quick way to back up is using a flash drive. A 512 meg flash drive costs about $100 and all you do is plug it into your usb port and copy to it or set your computer up to automatically back up to it.

Good luck on the recovery of your old hard drive,

Tom,
I assume you only had one partition on the hard drive? If you had a large enough hard drive you could have partitioned it so that Windows is on the C drive and you impotant stuff is on another drive. That way when the fit hits the shan you can reinstall windows and the files you want to keep will still be there.


Oh and the fact you are at work and even reading this site, they can still find out you went here regardless if you post or not.

[ 10-22-2004, 07:26 AM: Message edited by: CA420 ]

Instead of a small 512mb flash drive, consider a 120gig portable drive!!

MWAVE.COM
AA16460 WD 120GB WD1200JB EIDE ULTRA-ATA/100 7200RPM SE W/8MB BUFFER HARD DRIVE (Bare drive) $83.00

AA23790 MWAVE 780U2/3500FA USB2 3.5" ALUMINUM HDD ENCLOSURE
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So for little over $100, you have a portable 120gig hard drive you can plug into the back of your computer and it becomes a drive letter. You will need a USB 2.0 port on your system motherboard or get a 1378160 SIIG 5-PORT USB 2.0 ADAPTER $21 while you are at it.

Once its a drive letter, run NTBACKUP from accessories/system tools and backup your C: and system State to a file on the backup drive. You can also set this on a weekly schedule.

Those looking for more disk space could consider these other drive options with the same external usb cage:
AA24210 WD 160GB 1600JB ULTRA-ATA100 7200RPM 8MB (Bare drive) $89.90

AA19710 WD 200GB WD2000JB EIDE ULTRA-ATA/66-100 8.9MS 7200RPM 8MB BUFFER HARD DRIVE (Bare drive) $107

AA21500 WD 250GB WD2500JB EIDE ULTRA-ATA/66-100 8.9MS 7200RPM 8MB BUFFER HARD DRIVE (Bare drive) $140

O.K. I'm running again. New hard drive installed, everything seems to be back up to speed.
Now I just need to link the old drive with the new one and hope to recover the info.
Joe, Just to clarify, should I leave the old drive as master, or jumper it to slave? I know you explained it, but am still not sure.
The way I have it set up now is with cable select. Both drives set to Master. The instructions say this will "automatically" figure it out. I know how "automatic" things aren't. I guess I will just have to try cable select first, and if that doesn't work, maybe experiment with the "master\slave" combo.
Any insight from anyone is greatly appreciated.
I've owned a computer since 90, but still don't know enough about what I should. F:DISK has been my friend, but maybe I should change that.

'Cable select' might work if you put the old drive on the secondary channel. Don't put it on the same cable as the new drive.

You don't need to install the drive into the computer.... just plug it in and let it hang or lean it against the frame. Put a piece of cardboard between it and whatever you lean it against.

If all you want to do is transfer data off of it, then remove it, don't worry about taking any other devices plugged into that cable off for the time being. If the computer or Windows won't recognize it configured as Cable Select, make it Master on the secondary channel, and temporarily remove any other devices from that cable. Transfer the data you want to keep and then put everything back the way it was.

Originally posted by HwyStarJoe:
'Cable select' might work if you put the old drive on the secondary channel. Don't put it on the same cable as the new drive.

You don't need to install the drive into the computer.... just plug it in and let it hang or lean it against the frame. Put a piece of cardboard between it and whatever you lean it against.

If all you want to do is transfer data off of it, then remove it, don't worry about taking any other devices plugged into that cable off for the time being. If the computer or Windows won't recognize it configured as Cable Select, make it Master on the secondary channel, and temporarily remove any other devices from that cable. Transfer the data you want to keep and then put everything back the way it was. This is more proof of what I say to my users to encourage them to save important data to the file server. Hard drives are like light bulbs, its not a question of if they will go out, just when.

If he is running NTFS he might need to take ownership of the second drives partitions before he can access them.

Thanks Joe, I will try that. I assume the secondary cable is the one attached to the cd drive, A: drive, cd writer etc?

Heretic, what is NTFS? I'm thinking, "Not Talking For S**t" ? And how does one take ownership of the other partitions? Thanks for the help.

Tom, the floppy will be on it's own totally seperate ribbon cable from everything else.

The easiest way to tell which device is on which ribbon cable is to just trace them to the motherboard. The main bootable hard drive will be on the primary channel or port, but there could also be the CDROM\DVD drive on the same cable. They would definitely be configured as the primary 'slave' then.

Trace the ribbon cable from the CDROM drive and see if it's plugged into a second port on the motherboard, seperate from the main hard drive. The CDROM drive would then be configured (with the tiny plastic jumpers) as the secondary 'master' because it's on it's own channel.

NTFS = "Not Talking For S**T" LOL!! smile.gif
Close....
Without confusing you even more, just click the link that I Googled. It'll explain it better than I can.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&oi=defmore&q=define:NTFS

Thanks for the link and all the help Joe.
As much as I have become dependent on my computer, I really should learn more about it.
I'll save the "experiment" for this weekend.
I may have more ?? if you don't mind.

Ask away!