Seccondary Slave Drive

My dad has hooked my computer up with my old hard drive as a secondary slave drive that is "invisible" to the computer at the moment, on the hard drive are a few VERY important folders to me, the downside is that it is infected with one hell of a problem, virus i think I dunno, its my brothers fault any who he says to rescue the folders I want he has to "partition" it. I have no idea what that is, I cannot loose the folders on this drive to this cursed virus or whatever it is. On this old drive was a program that I absolutely LOVED called (No doubt you have herd of it) Go Back (3) any who, I could just revert the drive with goback and bingo fix my problem, the problem is, go back has an admin password that neither me my brother NOR my father put on it. It just suddenly appeared one day. :/ So I couldn't revert the drive and fix it myself (as I had done on more than one occasion.)

Can someone explain to me what exactly a secondary slave drive is and what partitioning is? I apologize in advance if this isn't the correct area to be posting this in. Many thanks to whomever replies.

 

If the drive has data on it that you want to recover, you do NOT want to partition it.

Partitioning is diving the drive up into pieces, much like partitions divide an office room into cubicles. You must partition a drive and then format the partition(s) to make them operable.

If your old drive is still healthy in the hardware sense, you should be able to see it if it is installed correctly in the other computer as a secondary drive.

Assuming it is an older PATA drive that uses ribbon cable, you must either set the jumper to Master and place it on its own ribbon cable, or set the jumper to slave and put it on the middle of the ribbon cable, with the Master drive on the end of the cable.

 

One thing dad did a couple of months ago was to open the drive up to view the files on it, needless to say, it infected my computer all over again, somehow dad contained the darn thing and was able to revert the other drive before it was completely ruined :/ Soooo I have no idea what is what really, its all so darn confusing.