Moving IDE Hard Drives

I'm trying to save the data from a hard drive out of my aunt's computer (A Compaq Presario with Windows XP) that died. The hard drive should be fine; riddled with viruses probably but fine.

Anyway I took it out and put it in another one of my aunt's computers (HP Pavilion xg823) which ran Windows ME. Turned it on and it claims there is no operating system. Obviously this isn't going to be as easy as I thought.

The only other thing I tried was connecting the two hard drives with an IDE ribbon that had three connectors. I set them on top of each other and laid them down in the case. (Probably not the smart thing to do. Oh well. Exiting experiment.) Turned it on and it booted. Went to My Computer and it did list the Compaq Presario's drive...but it was only the recovery partition! :cry

Please help me save this drive!

 

Firstly you are aware that if you copy data over from 1 HD to the other there is a possibilty the Viruses will come with it so what you need to do is hook it up as 'SLAVE'' (which is central position in ribbon) the extreme end will be 'MASTER'. Set jumper on central slave Hard Drive to 'SLAVE' then try a boot making sure in BIOS that the Master HD is set to first boot. If the Slave does not show in Windows (my computer) go to disk management and look to see if it is listed and if so you may be need to right click and import foriegn drive for it to show in my computer. Then do a Virus check on the suspected drive and post back.

 

Yes I am aware. Thank you.

The slave drive DID show up in My Computer. But again it was only the recovery partition. I haven't tried importing a foreign drive (just to see) like you said, it's very hard to do anything on the Windows ME computer. Explorer is always crashing. I might can find another computer to try soon.

 

Just to make sure--Have you set the jumpers on the slave drive to slave? It might make a difference as to whether or not Windows can see the drive in My Computer.

And look in Disk Management to see if Windows sees the missing partition even if it can't be accessed. It will show a bar graph of the partitions on the disk. The recovery partition will probably be listed as unknown type but the question is does the other partition show up at all?

 

The computer I am using has Windows ME. I cannot find Disk Management. I don't think it has it.

 

I'm thinking about this and I wonder if WinME can't see an NTFS formatted partition?

FDisk might let you see that the partition exixts but that won't do you much good.

If you have broadband internet you could download a live linux disk such as LinuxMint (700mb) and write it to CD as an image using Imgburn or similar burning software. Then boot from the disc and you will get a Windows looking desktop that should give you access to the missing partition and the data.

Otherwise, you may have to get it into an XP PC.

 

FDisk says it cannot access the drive.

I should be able to get my hands on a Windows XP computer tomorrow. I'll see how it goes then.