Newbie's major problem

A real newbie here but trying to catch up - like Zeno's tortoise.
I tried to repair my installation of of WinXP Home but only succeeded in reinstalling over the old. In an effort to preserve my files of photos letters useful links etc. I did not use the computer again. Instead I obtained a new compatible harddrive which I have installed as master to the old drive's slave. I installed WinXP on a partition of the new drive. The search facility has shown that the information on the old drive is (mostly) intact. But - the crunch - I cannot access it.
I now have two questions, one software and one hardware:
Will the two HDDs in the same bay overheat?
How can I access my data?

 

No worry's about overheating: I've seen ALOT of PC's w/ 2 HD's in the same bay and NEVER had one overheat. As far as accessing the data: remove the slave drive temporarily (the old HD). Boot to the new HD and let XP load to the desktop. Now shut down. Re-attach the slave drive (double check the jumpers: DO NOT use cable select! Use Master and Slave). Reboot the PC. Again let WinXP load up to the desktop. Wait a minute or two for the 2nd HD to get completely 'installed'. You should be able to access the data by opening My Computer and opening the D: drive (or E: or F:, whatever). BUT- any programs you had on that drive will not run. If this doesn't work, let us know and we'll proceed from there.

hopperdave2000

 

Thanks for that Sgt Hopperdave. Unfortunately that manoeuvre didn't work - twice I tried in case I had missed a trick. Most of the documents can be found using 'Search' (providing I can remember the name) but they cannot be opened. Strangely a programme for cleaning up did open and run when asked: I did not, of course ,exercise the delete option. Where now, I wonder?

 

You can try a data recovery program like Free Undelete, Avira's Undelete, Restoration; there's several good free ones available in the Data Recovery section here at 'the Geeks'. Another good one is PC Inspector but it appears that the hard drive version is no longer available from Major Geeks, only the mem-stick version. Try this link for the hard drive version: http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/download.htm
It can be a bit slow in scanning the drive, but it works great, and it's free! Good Luck!

hopperdave2000

 

Again thanks hopperdave. I tried those but with no success. However File Scavenger (M/Geeks data recovery section) proved itself a good buy by recovering not only what I thought lost but also what I had forgotten I had in the first instance. So all is now well in my billet. Over and out.