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Data Recovery Tutorial: How to Slave a Hard Drive

This is a tutorial from Jacqui Best about the proper procedure for slaving your hard drive prior to running data recovery software on it. This would also be the procedure to follow if you were to run speed clone to sector clone a noisy drive or if you have a partition problem and need to repair or recover data from a partition or if you need to restore or undelete a file.

It is very important to not download data recovery software directly to the effected hard drive. If you don’t have a second drive or don’t have either a USB drive or USB capable data recovery software, then you must hook the drive up as a slave to run the software.

Hard Drive Recovery Video Series – How to Slave A Hard Disk

Watch the video below to see how to slave a desktop IDE hard drive. If you have any questions post a comment at the bottom of the page. We answer all comments that are legitimate questions!

[flv:hard-drive-recovery-slave-disk.flv 320 240]

Related Resources

How to Slave a Laptop Drive
How to Slave SATA Drive Via USB
Hard Drive Recovery Help
Data Recovery Software
Data Recovery Freeware

Case Study: How to “Slave” your Hard Drive

In data recovery it is NEVER a good idea to install, copy, surf the Internet, reboot the machine, or do ANYTHING on the hard drive you are now trying to recover the data from. I often tell customer they need to Slave the hard disk to another computer, or put it in a USB chassis. What is difficult is the fact that the average home user has no idea how to do this, and it can be a very daunting task.

The following is a step by step walk through, with pictures on how to remove a hard drive from a computer, slave it to another and then be able to do a safe recovery of the hard drive. If the hard drive isn’t seen in the BIOS or is making noises you more than likely need hard drive recovery.

Tools needed: Phillips head screwdriver and a marker.

Step 1: Shut the PC down and unplug the power.

Step 2: Let’s take a look at the back of the computer and see that we need to unscrew and do in order to get the case open. It varies from model to model, so I am showing you on a standard tower case. You will see that there are screws holding on the side panels of the computer. You will need to remove both sides of the tower in order to free the hard drive.

After you remove the sides you will have a front and a back so to speak.

Front

Back

Step 3: While looking in the front we are going to locate and remove the hard drive. You will see below that the hard disk is located near the bottom of the drive chassis in side (the pink area I have highlighted). This is usually the case for most computers.

Step 4: We are going to need to remove the screws from the front and then go around the back of the pc and remove the screws on that side also.

Front Screws

Back Screws

NOTE: there is USUALLY a way to access these screws from the back. If there is not, I would contact, you local computer store fro help as it can become an issue of having to remove the motherboard and other peripherals.

Step 5: Now I want you to remove the power from the Hard Disk. This is a small cable with one red wire two black wires and a yellow wire running into a white connector. Be gentle and slowly pull the cable out, it may be a tight fit so usually slowly rocking it left and right will help remove it.

After you have unplugged it, take a marker and put a mark on it, this will help you to know which one to use when you put the drive back later.

Step 6: Here comes one of the hardest parts, removing the hard drive from the chassis. You are going to want to try and push, any cables in the way of the rear of the drive, up and out of the way. Firmly grab the back and top of the hard drive and pull back to free it.

PLEASE do this gingerly as you do not want to damage any other internal components.

Step 7: Now that the hard drive is free, Flip the hard drive over so that you are looking at the “green board” take you marker and make an arrow that is pointing to the power. This will help you to know which connector to use and which way it is supposed to be plugged into the drive.

Step 8: Holding the hard drive firmly, grab the cable and pull it out. This is another one of those tight cables. Be patient and careful, you don’t want to snap any of the pins off or break the cable.

Step 9: Ok so now we have the hard drive free from the computer, we need to set it to be a slave in the computer you are moving it to. If you take a look at the back of the hard drive there will be a set of pins usually located between the power and hard drive cables.
Now here is the tricky part.

Since Seagate owns Maxtor and Western Digital is the next most popular hard drive I will cover a Maxtor and Western Digital drives for how to set jumpers. (Almost all manufactures keep the jumper setting on the top of the drive on the label) Western Digital: If you look at the green board you will see that near those pins there are labels CS SLAVE MASTER PM2. You are going to want to put the jumper (which should be there already) on SLAVE.

Seagate/Maxtor: This manufacturer is the exact opposite of Western Digital. When you want to make a drive a slave you must make sure there is no jumper on the first set of pins next to the hard drive cable. Maxtor/Seagate have a very clear diagram on the top of their hard drives to explain how to set up as slave.

Step 10: Now that you have made the drive a slave, you can now move it to another computer, to attempt recovery. To do so please start by repeating steps 1 and 2 from above.

Step 11: Ok now another tricky part, putting the drive into the other computer. (for the sake of this walkthrough I am just re-inserting the drive into the same computer)What we need to do is now put the drive into an empty bay in the computer. And put one screw into the side. This is just to hold it in place while you do the recovery.

Step 12: Now find the hard drive cable coming off the hard drive that was already in the machine. To avoid a very lengthy explanation, I am just going to have you disconnect the cable from the hard drive. While looking at the cable you are going to want to connect the very end to the drive you are attempting to recover and the second from the end to original hard drive in the machine.

Step 13: Now connect a free power connector to the hard drive.

NOTE: if you do not have a free power plug you may need to buy a power splitter from your local PC Company.

The image below is what everything should look like when you have connected all the cables.

Step 14: Now replace the sides of the computer, and plug it back in. You should be able to boot into Windows now and attempt recovery.

Tags:

582 Responses to “Data Recovery Tutorial: How to Slave a Hard Drive”

  1. Acezan April 27, 2007 10:28 pm #

    ohhh i remember how to do it now ahahaha

    [ A c e W a s H e r e ]

  2. recuperar discos May 7, 2007 9:57 am #

    nice article and the photos really help.

  3. DTI Data Recovery May 23, 2007 10:12 pm #

    No the operating sytems do not have to be the same, but a lot depends on the file system on the XP. If it is NTFS there could be issues.

    I will have a support expert reply to this post tomorrow.

  4. Pye May 23, 2007 7:18 pm #

    Ok-I am not a tech, but do both the slave and master drive have to have the same operating system? My Win XP crashed, and I have an old Win 98 back up. Can I make the Win XP a slave on the Win 98?

  5. Pye May 24, 2007 2:53 am #

    Yes, the file system is a FAT 32. Thanks so much!

  6. DTI Data Recovery May 24, 2007 4:59 pm #

    This in from Jacqui Best:

    If the Win XP drive was formated fat 32, which might have happened if he has Win Xp HOME then yes it will work. If the Win XP machine has Win XP Professional, then it has a NTFS file system that Windows 98 will not reconize, and therefore will not work.

  7. Pye May 25, 2007 10:47 pm #

    Success! I was able to retrieve all data from the WinXP slave drive using Win98 as the master. Jacqui was correct: The older version of our WinXP Home was formatted with Fat32. Thereafter, reinstalling the OS on the crashed drive was very easy, as was transfering the data back onto the original hard drive from the Win98.

    Thank you!

  8. DTI Data Recovery May 26, 2007 11:03 am #

    That’s great! I hope more people use our blog to ask questions, so we can answer them and help others as well.

    • Rich December 14, 2010 10:41 pm #

      My mother board just went out on my computer so I got a new one. Now that I have the new one I need to get things off the old hard drive. I slaved the old hard drive. When going to “my computer” it shows that it is there. I can open it but I can’t find any of my saved files. Yikessssssssss

      • Jacqui Best January 10, 2011 3:24 pm #

        Rich,

        A lot of times the files are going to be in a USER profile and be inaccessible. You can try taking control of the folder or use recovery software like Recover It All to copy the files off which will strip off the permissions.

  9. anesh June 13, 2007 10:00 pm #

    thank u

  10. NewbieLP July 19, 2007 6:04 pm #

    Hi, this posting was SO helpful. I followed all the instructions to remove a secondary hard drive from our old pc (it crashed). I put the secondary in an usb enclosure, my laptop recognizes it, but when i click on it to access my files, it tells me that the disk must be formatted. Can anyone point me into the right direction?

  11. DTI Data Recovery July 20, 2007 8:43 am #

    Glad that we can help LP. Yes you are half way home to getting your data. The fact that your laptop sees the drive means that you can use data recovery software to recover the files, even though Windows want to format the drive.

    What Operating System was on your old computer? With that info I can point you to the right product.

  12. NewbieLP July 20, 2007 6:54 pm #

    Hi Michael,
    I’m so relieved that there’s hope! My old pc was running off of Windows XP – Professional. My laptop is Xp – home edition.
    If there’s anything else I can provide, please let me know. I appreciate it!
    -LP

  13. DTI Data Recovery July 23, 2007 1:43 pm #

    LP – the best software to use is Dart XP you can download a demo off of the DART XP Data Recovery Software page. Feel free to call our software support line at 1-866-438-6932 if you need help. Once you scan the drive and it shows your files, you can buy the program and recover your data. You won’t need to scan it twice. Call us if you need ANY help at all.

  14. DTI Data Recovery July 23, 2007 1:50 pm #

    Alysia, yes it is possible to do that with a usb hard drive enclosure that fits 2.5″ or laptop drives.
    There are also laptop IDE adapters that can allow you to plug in a laptop drive to a regular hard drive IDE cable. But the 2.5″ USB enclosure would be the easiest way to do it.
    CompUSA should have both of these items in stock, but I would call first to make sure.
    Here are examples online of what I am talking about:
    USB 2.5″ hard drive enclosure
    usb case
    Laptop to IDE adapter:
    Hard drive adapter
    Give us a call if you need any help: 1-866-438-6932.

  15. DTI Data Recovery July 23, 2007 3:53 pm #

    Alysia, I don’t know if Walmart has them, you would have to call them. Another option would be to buy a new hard drive install it as the master drive in your desktop, load the OS on that and get back up and running.

    After you have your desktop going on the new hard drive turn off the computer and follow the steps above and slave the old drive. Be sure to adjust the jumpers like the post says so your computer sees your old hard drive as a slave. You can then get your files off or run data recovery software on the old drive to get your data back.

    The other option is to buy an enclosure online and have it shipped to you.

  16. Alysia July 23, 2007 1:30 pm #

    Ok, my desktop has a corrupt file that is keeping it from booting, so I want to pull off some of the files that I do not want to lose (pictures, docs, etc) before I reinstall windows. But I only have a laptop as a second computer, can I set up the harddrive from my desktop to be a slave to my laptop? and how would I do that?

  17. Alysia July 23, 2007 2:13 pm #

    Ok, so I go get this enclosure and then I should be able to hook my desktop drive to my laptop and pull the files to my laptop? Can I get the enclosure at Wal-Mart? That is about as big a store as I am going to get around here….

  18. DTI Data Recovery July 24, 2007 9:43 am #

    Alysia, I agree that you should just replace the hard drive and try a recovery on the old drive. If your computer is a Dell or other manufacured machine like an HP, Compaq, etc. then the restore disks should be able to re-load everything including the OS. In fact having restore disks greatly eases the burden of re-installing everything.

    Make sure that the hard drive you buy is equal to or larger in GB than the old one, and you should be fine. Feel free to call me direct 727-345-9665 if you have any questions.

    Michael

  19. Alysia July 24, 2007 7:15 am #

    Walmart does have the enclosures, but if my harddrive is not recoverable, then I am going to have to get a new one anyway, so I should probably go ahead and try that route…the only concern that I have is the OS, all I have is the recovery disk that came with the system, can I use that to load the OS onto the new HD?

  20. Utterly Lost August 23, 2007 11:50 pm #

    OK, I was running a custom built machine, kinda my first step into the world of technology at it’s best. I had two 250 gig drives mirroring each other, with a 60 gig partition for the OS and other programs. the other 190 gigs all for file storage. My OS was Windows XP 64 bit Pro; I have a lot of song files and such on there that I’d rather not lose. I have secondary machine that it running win 98… I’m working on getting drivers for my WD 250 gig EXHD. and other sorts of USB goodies so I can Start Clearing room and Possibly Building that on up from it’s current state at about 30 gigs total HD space, 288 Mb of RAM, and it’s retro pentium II proccessor. What Should I do First? I would Love Some Help.

  21. DTI Data Recovery August 24, 2007 9:10 am #

    Utterly Lost (great name BTW!) I will have an engineer respond to your question today.

  22. Zeus August 27, 2007 2:41 pm #

    hello 🙂
    can you helpme recover my files.. or sugest any software..
    is a disk usb 2.5″ with 120gb.
    and when i tried access the disk.. show me de msg “..data corrupted or elegible” , i think is the partition.
    I run any applications and i can see the files (jpg, mp3, avi, mpeg..etc)

    but i can recover all files with one software.. because exist specfic software for jpg.. mp3..etc.

    can you tell me what can i do, for recover all of files? (+/- 90gb)

    sorry my english
    many thank you

  23. val eric August 28, 2007 8:59 pm #

    i put three (3) hard disk on my computer, hard disk #1 is in master mode, hard disk #2 and #3is in slave mode. but it is not working anymore. what action should i do?

  24. DTI Data Recovery August 30, 2007 4:03 pm #

    Zeus,

    DART XP will do the job if your drive was running Vista, XP or Server 2003.

    If you were running another OS use:
    Recover It All

  25. ayoola September 24, 2007 10:17 am #

    I need tutorial on computer networking and slaving of hard disk and the importance.thanks

  26. Linda October 3, 2007 9:00 pm #

    Hi Michael,
    I read the instructions on slaving a drive. Once I start windows again, the system doesn’t seem to see the slave drive. Was there something else I should do? Would I see the drive in my computer? Thank you!

  27. DTI Data Recovery October 4, 2007 11:14 am #

    Linda,

    What OS are you running? Can you tell if the slave drive is seen in the BIOS? If the BIOS doesn’t see the drive that means either the drive isn’t connected and jumpered properly or is in such bad shape that it isn’t seen by the BIOS.

    After you machine posts and the drives are being displayed you can hit the Pause/Break key and it will freeze that screen for you to see if it recogizes the slave.

  28. Michael Zab October 10, 2007 4:53 am #

    Hi Michael, I’m using Dell optiblex, GS520 and the signal cable arrangement is different. How do I slave a hard to this machine. I need to scan the hardrive and defragment it.

  29. Adediran November 29, 2007 2:23 pm #

    Hi. my laptop was a multi-user computer. however, some months ago, one of its user placed a password restriction on the internet content security and i dont know who it was.i have called the Manufacturer (Hp) and the best suggestion they could give me (after trying a lot of “maggic” to no avail) is to format the system. now, my Laptop can’t surf the internet because of this restriction. a friend suggested to me that i should “slave the hardrive” and in my quest for information, i bumped into you guys. pls is this the best option?, if yes, how do i go about doing that? (pls permit my epistle. i am just eager to get this problem fixed without loosing all my information). thanks

  30. Jacqui Best November 29, 2007 3:06 pm #

    Adediran-
    What is the profile you are currently logging in with? Is the laptop still being used by multi profiles or are you the only users. Is your only objective here to surf the internet and NOT have to format the disk?

  31. Barbara Kessler December 1, 2007 7:34 am #

    When I bought my new emachine last night they sold me a Jump Drive Fire Fly…and said I could save all from old computer on it then hook up new computer and transfer.

  32. Adediran December 2, 2007 3:55 am #

    No. now i use the computer alone. i was told that the only way i could solve this problem was to format the hardrive.but, if at all i need to do that, i want to “slave” the hardrive (thats what i dont know how to do). the pass word restriction is the only challenge the laptop has. Thanks

  33. Jacqui Best December 7, 2007 11:06 am #

    Barbara- They are correct, you can just transfer the files across, with the jump drive. You could also Network the machines together and do the transfer that way.

    Adediran- In order to “slave” that laptop disk, to your current laptop in an effort to get the data off. First you need to remove the drive from the machine, then insert a new drive in the laptop. You would then need to format and load an os on that drive. You will need a USB chasis in order to hook the OLD drive to the laptop to be able to move your files off. I am sure there is more simple fix to this problem and you are more then welcome to email me or give ma call to see if I can walk you through getting that password off.

  34. Dang_Computer December 19, 2007 6:20 pm #

    Hey! This was a really helpful tutorial…BUT I need to know how to slave a SATA to a IDE. I REALLY need to get the info off my SATA hard drives by using the IDE as the master. Any hope for me?

    Is there a way to do it without paying for converts?

  35. Will Smtih December 22, 2007 8:50 pm #

    Very useful information. I found that I had to attach the slave drive to the middle multi-pin connector rather than the end one in order for the computer to boot up normally. My Western Digital showed in a diagram how to move the jumper to make the slave work properly.

  36. Michele December 26, 2007 7:11 pm #

    Michael, I’ve been reading these posts on how to setup a slave and master and it doesn’t seem to be working. Tried several times making sure all Jumpers are set properly… both drives are the same drives Seagate Barracude IV ATA drives from slightly different model Dell Dimension workstations – both running Windows XP Home Edition – one of the drives won’t boot so I wanted to see if it was the drive and not something like the motherboard or other system problem from the failed Dimension. And of couse Mom desires her data (which she failed to backup :-).. So, when I get the failed drive setup as a slave to my working drive as Master – the system starts to boot (see the Windows XP splash screen and green status bar) and then all just goes blank (black)…nothing – no errors and just standard drive power or spin sounds. If I reboot and check the BIOS it shows a secondary drive as “unknown device” … is that the same as not recognizing it at all? Then, if I take the “failed” drive out and just boot the system again with my original working drive, all boots up just fine and I can access that system as expected. Any other helpful hints would be greatly appreciated before we consider canning it altogether rather than spending the $1500+ quoted to recover the data. Thanks!

  37. perla December 28, 2007 7:29 pm #

    Hi, I have been using a Compaq desktop computer. My dad brought a used computer home that his boss gave him. its used, but im guessing it wasnt used much, there was no music, or photos in it, there was a few extra programs but thats about it. anyway, when my dad brought this computer home, we unplugged the compaq and connected the new one, btw its an emachines. we used the new one a few days, but we wanted to get all out music and photos from our old one, so we tried plugging in the old one again, and it wouldnt turn on anymore. we were really confused because it was working fine. and then all of a sudden it wouldnt even turn on. so someone told me to come here so i could do this hard drive slaving thing. what exactly will this do? will i have two hard drives that i can store things in? or is this just so i can copy my old info onto the new computer?

  38. Mike C. January 1, 2008 4:51 pm #

    It sounds simple enough. My old hard drive is clearly labeled “slave” where I have to move the jumper to. The only problem is that my new PC is different inside. No more flat ribbon cable from the mother board to the various drives. Now its just some wiring harnesses with different type connectors. I can see that the comnnector area on the various drives are different from my older PC so I don’t know how I can connect the old drive to me new PC. I suppose I’ll have to take it to a computer center and have to pay for some one else to do it now.

  39. DTI Data Recovery January 4, 2008 12:27 pm #

    Perla,

    Yes this post shows how to slave a hard drive so that you can either copy data off, or if there is an issue with the file system you can use data recovery software to recover your files.

    After you get off your data, you can certainly use the drive as extra storage or to back up your important files.

  40. DTI Data Recovery January 4, 2008 12:31 pm #

    Mike C

    Can you tell me more about your new machine? Are the drives SATA? Those ribbons are small and usually red. Let me know and we will do what we can to help you.

    Another option is to get an external USB hard drive case and plug your old drive into that. In fact that is a good idea for people that have an old drive that is working. Slaving a hard drive is usually done primarily for data recovery, an example we see a lot is a hard drive is recognized in the BIOS, but not by Windows. In that case you have to slave the drive since data recovery software doesn’t always work well through USB and Firewire.

  41. Rosalyn January 12, 2008 5:15 pm #

    Michael

    My old drive that I’m trying to recover data from ran Windows 98. My new computer runs Windows Vista…Is it still possible to slave my older drive?

    Also, the drive on the newer computer is SATA and has small, red ribbons. Hower, there is an extra cable that hangs from the cable connecting to the DVD burner that would fit into the back of the older drive…Should I use it? Would appreciate any input.

  42. primate January 13, 2008 11:37 pm #

    My Western Digital 2500 (from a Gateway) doesn’t have an obvious slave setting. It has SSC_DIS, PM2, OPT1, & OPT2. Will any of these work?

  43. Chelle January 30, 2008 10:49 am #

    Hi

    Is it possible to use an external hard drive enclosure (with the unbootable ide drive inside the enclosure), connected to a computer with a working hard drive, via U.S.B., in order to get at least some of the data from the unbootable drive?

    Or, should I get a 2.5 to 3.5 ide adapter and actually slave the unbootable drive inside the desktop tower?

    Or try both?

    Thanks

  44. Jacob February 5, 2008 2:08 pm #

    Hey I have a laptop harddrive that i want to recover data. I tried to set the master harddrive as master, and the laptop as slave but it says cannot boot and gives me an error. Is there a way to hook the laptop as a slave?

  45. Paul February 17, 2008 8:42 pm #

    Hi, need help!
    I run XP pro. It got corrupted and as usual I had not backed up my documents.
    I have made it a slave drive. Iv’e got all info. Except the stuff i have in my documents. I am unable to get into this part.

  46. Jacqui Best February 19, 2008 10:02 am #

    Paul the reason you can not get into the files is that you do not have proper permission on that folder. You will need to take control of the folder in order to gain access to the data.

    The following link explains how from microsoft to do that.
    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421

  47. Frank Smith February 26, 2008 1:20 pm #

    My computer PSU recently blew taking the MOBO along with it so i got a new computer and i attempted to install the harddrive form my old computer as a master and the new computers harddrive as a slave but it failed. When i booted it it displayed the blue screen and said their might be a problem with a new harddrive that i installed so i had to slave the old one. Is their anyway i can make my old one the master and still have the new one as a slave? any help will be much appreciated (both drives are running win xp home if that helps)

  48. Karl February 26, 2008 2:23 pm #

    I am going to slave a hard drive that I need to recover. It’s in a computer that fails once the password screen comes up. It’s running XP Pro. Once I slave over the HD will I need to load anything or will it recognize the slave. Both HD’s are in computers running XP Pro

  49. Paul February 26, 2008 7:38 pm #

    Went to site worked a treat thanks!!!!

  50. john davies March 15, 2008 1:01 pm #

    I have a five year old emachine T1742 with a newer 300GB Samsung HDD PATA running XP. The HDD has a lot of data and photo files. the mobo on the emachine blew (according to the pc-shop) so I bought a new Acer with a 160GB SATA HDD and Vista Home Basic. The new mobo has a PATA connection and power (different for the SATA dive) that works for the old HDD. However, when I set it up to run with the new system, it shows up as an F drive and Vista wants to format the drive (which I think will wipe it). IS there another way to get the files of the old drive?

  51. Jeremy C March 27, 2008 11:39 pm #

    My computer quit working and was old so I just bought a new computer. I pulled out the old Hard Drive and bought and external hard drive case to hook it up via USB to get all my files and pictures off the old drive. Everything hooked up fine and the drive opens up and all the files are there but when I try to open them it says I do not have access privileges.

    Does anyone know how I can get around this so I can just transfer all the files to my current hard drive and just reformat the external one.

    I know some about computers but not all the real technical stuff.

    Can anyone help me??

  52. JMC April 2, 2008 1:53 pm #

    Question… I’ve got a corrupt hard drive. The dreaded BSOD popped up, I’m running XP Professional. When I tried to do a repair, using the XP Professional disk, the XP Windows Installation partition is listed as “Unknown”. If I try to repair, the repair mechanism doesn’t work because there is no partition listed as XP. I even tried to use the AWR…got to a DOS prompt, but the C: drive doesn’t show in the choices and won’t allow me to CD to it…

  53. Jennifer April 15, 2008 8:38 pm #

    My computer crashed and it was running windows 98 and I want to slave it to my laptop. My laptop is currently running Vista and I wanted to know if it would be compatible before I go out and buy an enclosure. Please Help!! Thanks

  54. DTI Data Recovery April 16, 2008 10:07 am #

    Jennifer,

    Yes you can put a Win 98 drive in an enclosure and use Vista. If you are unable to pull data off, we have software that will do it. Feel free to call us at 727-345-9665 if you need support.

  55. Mark April 26, 2008 10:00 am #

    Hi I have a new vista machine that windows is corupt. I don’t want to loose the data. I have an external SATA drive that I put the drive in and attached the external drive to an xp pro machine. The drive shows up as the e drive but it wants to format the drive. Is there a way to get at the data? Can you help?

  56. mark June 18, 2008 7:55 pm #

    I have a Maxtor one touch mini (120 GB). I was loading video to it and I believe that I put more data than I had memory. The memory is full and shows I have no free space. When I connect the USB cable, it recognizes it as a hard drive(but in no longer says Maxtor) When I click on it, I get “error: the file or directory is corrupted and unavailable” How can I retrive that data from this sytem.? Will the slave process work with this type of external HD?

    Thank you

  57. michael/Mark June 18, 2008 8:12 pm #

    I have ran the seaTools for Windows on the previous Maxtor external drive.
    Short DST-Pass
    Short Generic- Pass
    Long DST-Pass
    Long Generic-

    I assume that there is hope for retreiving the data with the above diagnodtics.
    Your thoughts?

  58. Dave June 19, 2008 10:36 am #

    What are the results of the test outlined above? Pass?/Fail? In regards to the Maxtor above the USB device will get recognized in Windows. You can go to computer management and see if the drive it self is being detected at all. If the drive is not detected then you may have some type of mechanical hard drive malfunction.

  59. michael/Mark June 19, 2008 10:57 pm #

    Tthe drive passed all the tests without issue. could you walk me through the computer management assessment?
    Thank you for your quick response

  60. Dave June 20, 2008 10:14 am #

    Sure the quickest way is to right mouse click on my computer. You will see an option box appear. One of the options will manage, click on manage. This will open the computer management console. One of the options in the console is Disk Management, click on that. If you drive is working (mechanically) you should see it there. You will see your boot drive, it will show partitions and the file system type. If your drive has some type of major file system problem it may show up as “unknown”. Good luck.

  61. Dave June 20, 2008 10:37 am #

    PS: Follow up to previous post: If your drive is recognized in disk management you can use data recovery software to pull the files off to another drive. You can use any of our data recovery software demos to see if the data is retrievable. If you can see the files with the software you can purchase after it has been confirmed that the data is recoverable.

  62. michael/Mark June 21, 2008 2:23 pm #

    it does see the HD (even now says Maxtor), however does not have a file system–it is blank. It mentions that I have 111 GB of space available–not good since it was nearly full when it was working properly. the properties tab, says that everthing is working properly, Very weird.
    Thanks for all your help with this, your thoughts?

  63. Dave June 22, 2008 4:27 pm #

    Based on your diags I would say you have some type of logical failure. Windows is unable to read the file system for some reason ( perhaps a bad boot or partition sector etc. ); therefore, Windows will show this drives physical size or max lba sectors but will not show the data on the drive. So this is good new you have a green light to use some good data recovery software like RIA or DART to recover the data. The only caution flag I have to through is to watch for read errors or noises starting to come from the drive. In some cases the drive can not proprigate to file system because the heads inside the drive are starting to fail. If you experience read errors or noises such as clicking stop what your doing and contact a professional.

    Good Luck
    Dave

  64. michael/Mark June 24, 2008 10:58 pm #

    Dart XP worked great and recovered all of my files!!!!! Is there a way to erase the external hardrive and reformat so that it can be used again?
    I would have not been able to do this if you had not helped me diagnose the problem.

  65. Dave June 25, 2008 10:03 am #

    Sure go back into computer management then to disk management. Right click on the drive and create a new partition then format the drive. I recomend a full format as to a quick. A full format will reallocate or remove any bad sectors it does take a lot longer but may be worth the time. I am glad to have helped…

    Dave

  66. jhazeph July 1, 2008 11:45 pm #

    can i slave hard drive on my notebook?

  67. DTI Data Recovery July 2, 2008 8:41 am #

    jhazeph,

    Yes you can, in fact later today I am posting a video on how to slave a laptop hard drive to a USB enclosure. Stay tuned!

  68. peter July 2, 2008 4:30 am #

    i read above that slaving a windows xp pro hard drive to a win 98 computer might not work. is there a way around this? my win xp pro hard drive is fine, it’s just my processor died so i need another computer to access the data. my only other computer runs win 98, and i want to slave it to this computer. i’m just worried that it might erase data if i try to slave it. any help would be appreciated. thanks

  69. Jacqui Best July 2, 2008 12:03 pm #

    peter,

    No it is not going to work.. I should not erase the drive but it will not be readable by Windows 98. The reason is that the drive is going to be formatted NTFS, which Windows 98 will not be able to see. Your best bet, and what I tell alot of customers is to get your self an external USB chassi (walmart has them) and put the drive in that. Then you can take it to any friends house and plug it in.. just like you would a camera card or a thumb drive.

  70. DTI Data Recovery July 2, 2008 4:39 pm #

    Peter,

    I am forwarding your question to Jacqui, but I think she is gone for the day. There are Linux OS’s that you can run off of a CD. Here is a post from Jacqui on BART PE data recovery.

    Michael

  71. peter July 2, 2008 4:23 pm #

    i see jacqui. thanks for your reply. i will look into that. i was also told that i could try downloading an ntfs software onto my win 98 computer that will allow me to read the win xp pro hard drive. is this true, and is there any risk of losing data if i do this?

  72. peter July 2, 2008 4:25 pm #

    and about the ntfs software, i tried searching for some softwares online, but i’m not sure which website to trust, so if you think this method is ok, would you be able to help me select the correct software?

  73. Jacqui Best July 2, 2008 10:07 pm #

    Peter,
    Let me look into software to allow you to read an ntfs partition. I dont want to steer you in the wrong direction. Michael I correst you could make a Bart PE CD, and the blog explains how to do it, and you should be able to transfer data between the hard disks and it would not cause any more issus with the disk. I will post again tomorrow some readers for ntfs, and try and be sure they will not harm your data.

  74. peter July 2, 2008 5:34 pm #

    thank you michael. i’ll read the post while i wait for jacqui’s reply.

  75. Jacqui Best July 3, 2008 1:32 pm #

    Peter,
    After further research I do not feel safe having you use one of the programs that allow Windows 98 to read a NTFS partition. The only wone that seemed to be any good at doing it was by systernals and they are not supporting it or even offering it anymore. Alot that I read says that doing this can corrupt the NTFS volume. So I would say that either making a bartPE CD (which you need access to a machine running windows XP) or to plug your drive into another computer.

  76. peter July 3, 2008 2:32 pm #

    thanks jacqui. about the softwares corrupting the ntfs volume, that is the case even if i am only reading data from it, not reading and writing? is there a way to slave it to a laptop that runs win xp pro? if not, as a last resort i think i may try to buy an external usb case like from usb case. this does not run any risks, does it?

  77. alan July 16, 2008 9:58 pm #

    Hi folks.. Windows ME became corrupt, and could no longer access ms-dos, nor the START button, nor many other OS functions.. I tried reloading the OS over itself into the same folder but that didn’t work, and now I cannot boot the machine. So much for my great ideas!

    I like the computer, which has a P4 processor, parallel port, usbs, floppy, and CD burner. I just want to pull my datafiles off the 40G EIDE 7200rpm drive. I don’t think there is any physical problem with the drive.

    Bought a 320GB Seagate barracuda (70 bucks!). I figure this will be my new C drive, on which I will load a legal copy of XP Pro which I own from the purchase of an ill-fated Dell. (Cracked motherboard or no, they won’t take ’em back after 30 days!)

    I then intend to slave the old drive, copy all the datafiles onto the new C drive, and then either just junk the 40G, or reformat it and leave it in as a slave.

    Questions: is there a better way to go about it? Will there be any problem with different file formats? Will the presence of a corrupt ME on the slave disk cause a problem, before I can pull off the datafiles?

    Strange as it sounds, I’d be happy to simply have the old 40G system working again under ME, and forget the upgrade.

    TIA for your help!

  78. Jessica July 18, 2008 8:48 pm #

    Is it possible to install keyboard and mouse drivers on an enslaved hard drive? or would i have to back up my files and then reinstall my OW?

  79. DTI Data Recovery July 23, 2008 10:09 am #

    James,

    Like you said in your comment, the bad news is the drive isn’t being recognised. Once you build out your laptop with the new hard drive you could see if your old drive is seen by your laptop. Here is a link to our instructions along with a video on How To Slave A Laptop Hard Drive To A USB Enclosure.

    If your damaged hard drive can’t be seen, then it has to go to a data recovery company like ours. We take our clients privacy very seriously. We often do work for the government and military where security is of prime concern. Feel free to call us for a no obligation quote. Our services are no data no charge so you only pay if we recover your files – and they work!

  80. James Belcher July 23, 2008 9:40 am #

    Hi Guys

    Big problem with my hard drive. I have an error code 1000-0146 doing a Google search on this code shows that Im in big trouble. I took my laptop to my I.T. department at work who are pretty good. They removed the hard drive and tried to access it from another PC. The good news is the drive is spinning. The worst news of all is the PC wont recognise it. Well we gave it about five mins and nothing came up. I would have thought by now it should have.

    I really need to get some email address from the hard drive and some holiday pics. I kept thinking I need to do a back up but tomorrow always seemed more appropriate. Do the back up now! Is what I should have done.

    So the question is Im going to build the laptop back up with a new hard drive. Once this is done buy the wire thing that connects my old one to the new one. What else do I need to be able to get into the drive. The I.T. guy said he would look at it for me but I dont want him or any one else going through my files. I have a few bank account passwords on there and also all my sites passwords and stuff. I need to get access to this. Plus my first holiday away with the girlfriend would be nice.

    So what are the steps an idiot needs to take to access the files? Or does it need to be taken to an expert?

    Thanks

    James

  81. Jacqui Best July 25, 2008 10:27 am #

    I would get a USB enclosure for the drive wait for windows to bott and then plug that in, alot of time in data recovery we have to try to fool windows into to letting us see something the would prefer we didnt. It is likely the drive has some kind of physical damage.. it bad sectors and that is why the machine will no longer boot with it inside the machine.

  82. Bryan Ng July 25, 2008 7:52 am #

    I put my corrupted hard drive as slave drive to recover my lost data, in result my pc unable to boost at all. Same thing happen when I try to put the hard drive as slave drive in other pc, what should I do? I have lot of photo inside the hard disc.

  83. total amature August 4, 2008 1:42 pm #

    First, this blog is awesome! Thanks.

    I saw this question above but didn’t see the answer – My Western Digital 2500 (mine is a WD Caviar SE 1600 SATA from a Gateway) doesn’t have an obvious slave setting. It has SSC_DIS, PM2, OPT1, & OPT2. Will any of these work?

    Also, should I install the new drive and the Gateway recovery disk prior to trying to re-install my old hard drive as the slave, just to be safe?

    And, it looks like the power cord in the system has multiple connections, the last of which was connected to my old drive. Does it matter which order that cord connects to my master and slave?

    Finally, there are four identical slots on the motherboard where the drive data cord attached. Do I need to buy another data cord to attach my new drive directly to the motherboard? Or, is there a special cord that will connect to both drives? If you say I need to have two cords, does it matter which goes in which slot?

  84. Jhaye August 5, 2008 11:50 am #

    ok, i’ve got a seagate HD (hard drive), the diagram over the disk says if your going to make the disk to a be a slave, it says that don’t put any jumper at all, and it works, the PC detected everything, now i’ve a new drive. The problem now is, the whole system hang’s up!!! any problem with that? what is the couse of this problem, can you help me please?

  85. Gypsy August 9, 2008 3:05 am #

    Please Help!!

    As with the majority of us, I need to get 6 years of pics out of hard drive (no back-up) I had a Gateway Windows XP-Home and it was hard booted off after freezing up, and the next day it said windows could not start…it wouldn’t in “Normal”, Last known…” or in “Safe mode”. It just kept going with the vicious circle…At last we got the message that “systems32DRIVERSpci.sys is missing or currupt” We got into the BIOS..not too sure but we tried the load optimal defaults…no change. And after reading lots of info in the WEB, did the F8 thing and tried both the OS disk and the Drivers Disk , it showed partion “Unknown”. We attempted to continue but it said we would need to back to the last step and delete the partion and continue. We stopped, because of our pictures…We removed the HD and installed as a slave (after several attempts) it worked. I was soooo excited until I realized I had a bunch of files without substance (shells) and that under Documents and Settings my pictures weren’t there. No files saying “My Docs or My Pics” as it was when it worked. A folder stating Program Files had nothing in them either. I’ve tried making the files so all users could access (the security tab thing) but it made no difference. Do I need a data recovery program? Help! I only care about the pictures, and maybe a few docs at best! What should I do? Thanks in advance for your help!

  86. Jessica August 10, 2008 4:54 pm #

    My desktop PC Western Digital Hard drive (Windows 2000) was no longer booting. I pulled it from the machine and placed it in a USB external case and plugged it into my laptop running Vista. I can feel the hard drive running fine and the laptop says that it is working properly, but it doesn’t show up in My Computer. Do I need to slave and master the set since I am using an external USB case? Does it need to be the same operating system. I wouldn’t worry about it but I have a few months of my toddler’s photos on here that are really important, and this stopped working just as I was going to download to my new laptop. Any suggestions?

  87. teachingazteca August 11, 2008 2:48 pm #

    I am having a similar problem as Linda below, and Bios picks up my slave drive, but I can’t access it or see it once windows starts. I have win 98se on this machine, the master is 10G and slave is 80G used for mostly storage, but my daughter installed a few programs on it, too. I might also note that it was close to full (we were going to burn stuff off it to make room) and the machine came up with a bad sector message (I did not see this happen as I wasn’t there) but we ran scandisk and everything is now fine, it’s just that we can’t see or access the slave drive in windows.

    Linda,

    What OS are you running? Can you tell if the slave drive is seen in the BIOS? If the BIOS doesn’t see the drive that means either the drive isn’t connected and jumpered properly or is in such bad shape that it isn’t seen by the BIOS.

    After you machine posts and the drives are being displayed you can hit the Pause/Break key and it will freeze that screen for you to see if it recogizes the slave.

  88. Marie August 17, 2008 3:39 pm #

    ok….so I come home from the river to find my computer is not working….I mean I can boot it up but I get an error screen….the error screen is from Norton GoBack…it says
    Norton GoBack (118)
    Your computer crashed or was shut down while Norton GoBack was in the middle of recovery on disc #1. Unless there is a serious problem and recovery continues to fail you should allow Norton GoBack to continue the recovery process, ortherwise data loss may occure.
    Do you wish to continue recovery?
    then there is a box for yes and one for no
    I can only hit enter which I assume is yes….that does absolutly nothing….
    I have a sony vaio pc…desk top….the model number is vgc-rb50…
    soo…I decide I will have to slave the hard drive…I open the computer and my hard drive isnt like the one in your pics…it is a Maxtor SATA…it has the smaller red ribbon…what do I do now?…I really dont have a clue….Thanks for your help…

  89. texasCS August 17, 2008 11:35 pm #

    Hi my Western Digital 250gig external will not turn on. I’ve tried everything and I’m pretty sure it’s just a fried/defective on/off switch and that the hard drive itself is fine. I removed the external drive from the case and want to slave it (permanently if I can) to my current internal drive. OS is Windows XP Profesional SP2. Format is NTFS. Internal cables are ATA/IDE.

    My external drive is formatted as Fat 32 and has SATA connectors.
    My Questions… 🙂

    Can I still connect/mount everything if they are different formats?

    If I buy a SATA card and cable to connect to the motherboard or buy an IDE to SATA converter is that okay or will it cause problems because I’ll be using ATA/IDE and SATA?

    The drive says, “Master/Slave jumper not requred for SATA” so obviously I only need to connect power and the SATA cable, correct?

    The external has its own backup software and stuff pre-installed. Can I just delete all that and start with a “blank canvas” if I can get the drive working and recognized by the BIOS?

    Please advise.
    Thanks so much. The origianl post and answers to other questions are great!

  90. Marie August 18, 2008 11:39 am #

    so…I went out and bought an external hard drive enclosure..I tried to transfer the data from one hard drive to the other…My compter recognized the hardware was plugged in but when I went to my computer it didnt show the mass storage device…honestly….my mind is frazzled….any clue what to do now?
    Thanks for any and all help….

  91. Jacqui Best August 18, 2008 5:09 pm #

    Texas:

    You can connect the hard drive with a sata conrtoller internal to the machine if you like OR (and this is my personal preference) you can go buy an external sata chassi and just plug it up that way. Either of the options is going to cost you about the same cash wise, but the external chassi will leave less of a chance of messing up what is going on inside the machine already.

  92. Jacqui Best August 18, 2008 5:14 pm #

    Marie:

    What I want you to do is go in to the disk management utility and see if the device is showing up there. It is likely that the problem is one with the file system so there for in “MY COMPUTER” the drive will not be reflected. The way you can get to disk management is by right clickong on my computer and going to MANAGE. You will see “Disk Manager” in that screen. Now from here if the machine is seeing the drive but not mounting it with adrive letter we have alot of options for getting your data off. Just let me know what the next step is

  93. Jacqui Best August 18, 2008 5:18 pm #

    total amature:

    If you have a SATA drive then the selection of MASTER/SLAVE is done by where it is plugged in on the mother board. They are usually labeled (SATA0 SATA1 etc) I would recommend in your situation to have a new drive FULLY loaded with the OS and everything before adding this drive as to not comprimise the data while reloading windows. I hope this helps

  94. Jacqui Best August 18, 2008 5:22 pm #

    teachingazteca:

    I would love to help with a reason why WIN98SE is not seeing the drive but the fact is, it has been over 10 years since I touched that OS. It could be that the drive no longer has its system info after the scan disk, which would be my educated guess. I would say that is you have a machine with a newer OS hanging around and the data is important that you try slaving it on that or getting a USB chassi for the drive. I wish I could be more helpful but, there is so much that can go wrong when scan disk is run to completion that I cant be sure how your operation system is reacting to that.

  95. Jacqui Best August 18, 2008 5:25 pm #

    Gypsy:
    Ok, leaveing aside everything that happened until your were able to access the drive I have a few questions.

    1. Did you ever get anything like “ACCESS VIOLATION”
    2. Did Windows try and run chkdisk or scandisk on the drive when you first loaded it?
    3. is the drive size reporting correctly when you right click on it and go to properties?

  96. Jacqui Best August 18, 2008 5:28 pm #

    Jhaye:

    I need the make and model of both drives and what configuration you like on them. If I have that info I can let you know how jumper them for MASTER/SLAVE

  97. sheba August 23, 2008 7:22 pm #

    I have a computer that I built I have two hard drives one of them I store mostly files on and the other is the boot drive. My computer has a virus on the c drive that I’ve been trying for two days to delete but can’t now I’m stuck. I don’t want to reinstall windows but I think I might have to. Do you know anything else I can try to help get rid of the virus on my computer it’s a trojon horse named iprip and I think the other one is vonous or something like that. It slows my computer down a lot and takes over what ever space I have left on my c drive. It hasn’t affected my f drive just the C. Please help I have a lot of files on my computer I didn’t back up and I don’t want to loose the information I have on my computer. Oh and Virus protection keeps trying to delete the files but they keep coming back. I even tried deleting them in safe mode but that didn’t work either. If you could help I would appriciate it alot.

  98. DTI Data Recovery August 24, 2008 2:32 pm #

    Sheba – I have sent this to Jacqui, our tech support guru. She will answer it tomorrow for you so check back then!

  99. Gypsy August 30, 2008 4:00 am #

    Hi Jacqui, it’s Gypsy.

    To answer the best I can. Yes it did auto run some scan check on the E drive and mentioned corrupt and then deleting I think, (it’s soooo fast) and lately it had alot more that it would run through.

    In properties, it says 14.4 GB used, 60 GB free = 74.5 capacity, but the drivve is 80 GB.

    We just took it out and put it in an external drive, and it didn’t run through a scan, but it didn’t come up with anything different.

    The program Files say 0 files and that it is unaccesable///File or directotu is corrupted and unreadable

    In the folder that says Documents and settings, only the sample pics that are pre-installed are there.

    Does this help give you any ideas? I’m desperate, I only want the pictures.

    Thanks again,

    Gypsy

  100. craig r September 1, 2008 12:02 pm #

    My Maxtor hard drive would no longer boot up, so I installed a new Western Digital as the master – and once I got it loaded and up and running – I put the old Maxtor in as a slave, hoping to extract some data from it.
    Explorer has assigned a letter drive to the old Maxtor hard drive, but when I try to access it I get “Insert disk in drive G:” Why would this be?

  101. jacqui best September 2, 2008 7:02 pm #

    craig: it could be that the system area of the drive has real problems.. and is very confused. I would recommend either trying the DART XP software if the drive is ntfs or Recover It All if it is a FAT file system. Either way you are going to need something third party in order to access the disk.

  102. Deborah S September 2, 2008 8:21 pm #

    I have a relatively new HP Pavilion Notebook running Vista Home. It seems my video card died and I must send it in to be repaired. I would like to remove alot of files and pictures from it before I do that.

    Is it very hard to remove the hard drive and hook it up externally to a desktop running XP Pro, copy over any files, etc and delete them from the hard drive and reinstall it? If it is possible what piece of equipment might I need to do this?

  103. DTI Data Recovery September 3, 2008 9:29 am #

    Deborah –

    You have an option that isn’t too difficult. If you can remove the hard drive, you can get a USB enclosure and slave the drive that way. Here is a link to a video tutorial on how to slave a laptop drive to a USB enclosure.

  104. Deborah S September 3, 2008 5:05 pm #

    Thank you Michael, I thought that was the way to go. I did get my hands on a USB enclosure for a 2.5 SATA drive. I’m about to dismantle the laptop! unfortunately it has two drives so I’m starting with #2 thinking that is probably the “D” drive that I use for files, music and pics as opposed to the OS (hoping that they put that on #1).

    I am on my way to research how to get the drive out without damaging it. I’m sure it just a matter of popping it out, I just don’t know which end to start from.

    So much different that the desktops I am used to working on.

    Thanks again, and I’m sure I’ll be back.

  105. DTI Data Recovery September 4, 2008 2:25 pm #

    Deborah,

    Feel free to give us a call if we can be of assistance. 727-345-9665, our software support team answer the phone from 9 AM EST to 10 PM EST so choose software tech support if you call after 5 PM EST and you will get through to one of our tech’s who can help you figure out the stuff you need to know!

  106. Deborah S September 4, 2008 9:47 pm #

    I was successful in getting the hard drive out of the laptop, connecting the cables and USB to my second laptop and am in the process of moving the files off of it. Since the old laptop has 1.1 USB’s it is taking a little longer than I expected but at least I’ve gotten this far.

    When it is done I will re-install the hard drive, pack up the machine and ship it off to HP for repair. Gee, I should be without for what, about two weeks.

    Thank you for your help and the offer of being as close as a telephone, it is much appreciated.

  107. kelly September 7, 2008 7:54 pm #

    HELP…. my external hard drive all of a sudden wouldn’t let me get into my folders that are on it it just kept saying not repsonding then after unplugging it and putting it back in it wont come up and says i have to format the harddrive before i can use it but i cant do that all my photos and stuff are on there is it possible that it has a virus and it has stuffed it?

  108. DTI Data Recovery September 9, 2008 12:49 pm #

    Deborah – great news! We knew you could do it.

  109. DTI Data Recovery September 9, 2008 12:51 pm #

    Kelly,

    It is possible that you have a virus, but it is more likely that there is either a problem with your file system or worse the hard drive.

    We have software that can recover your data. I need to know what operating system you are using on your computer that you hook the external hard drive up to. Then I can tell you which software is right for you.

  110. Desi September 12, 2008 2:25 pm #

    I have a laptop that says there is no OS. It could just be a corrupt file the local fix-it shop says.So when I use the usb thing with my laptop harddrive inside it, to hook to my desktop or another laptop and I verfiy that I can see my files what does this software recovery software do? Do I really need that or can I just move the files that I see to various places to save off of this disk before I reload my OS to it?
    thank you!

  111. Ralph Otrembiak September 13, 2008 1:03 pm #

    This looks real helpful. Thanks! My problem is simple and slaving the hard drive is an option. But I was wondering if there is something else that I could do. I ran a disk check (i.e. check disk for errors with the automatically fix and repair option.) on a Windows 2000 system. It says the check will be done on reboot. The computer is restarted and goes into the scheduled disk check. In part 4 of 5 it gets hung up at 96% completion. So I restart the computer and the same thing happens. So I am stuck in this loop because the disk check can not complete. When the computer prompts hit any key to cancel disk check , I do . But nothing happens, the keyboard is not recognized. So I am continuously in this loop. How can I get the computer to recognise the keyboard at this prompt? It is recognized at other prompts.

  112. HardDriveWorries September 16, 2008 3:43 pm #

    Please help. I’ve got a Dell Laptop with three hard drives which I swap out depending on the work I’m doing. One hard drive has recently crashed (not booting up anymore) and I’m trying to recover as much data from it as possible. Can I slave it to one of the working drives using a USB port? If so, how?
    Thanks for the help. -CH

  113. Jay September 16, 2008 7:37 pm #

    Hello, I Have an HP entertainment laptop thats a couple years old. (512mb ram 80GB HD etc) anyway my HD died and I bought a new one. Can you tell me how to slave my old HD to recover some data without paying 200 for geeksquad to do it? I know the info is here somewhere but I cant find anything step by step. I do have some computer repair experience so I know I can do it with some guidance. Thanks in advance!

  114. DTI Data Recovery September 17, 2008 10:09 am #

    Jay, HardDriveWorries,

    Both of you seem to be in a similar situation. Below is a link to a video tutorial on how to slave a laptop drive to a USB enclosure.

    Once you can access the hard drive there are several software options that you can use to actually restore files. Feel free to call us or post a reply here with questions on which software to use. We do have some free data recovery softwarethat will work on FAT 32 partitions or if they are NTFS our DART XP can recover your files. All of our software is fully supported so call us at 727-345-9665 and ask for software support.

  115. DTI Data Recovery September 17, 2008 10:21 am #

    Ralph,

    You might have a real problem here. Do you have the ability to clone the hard drive? A clone will make a duplicate copy of the hard drive sector by sector which will allow you to fix the problem and recover data. More than likely your hard drive has a bad sector or two in the area where the operating system files are.

    You can get speed clone here.

    Once you clone the drive you can reinstall the os on a new hard drive. With data recovery software you can get your data off of the old drive and on to the new one. Let me know if this is a solution for you.

  116. DTI Data Recovery September 17, 2008 5:25 pm #

    Jay, there is a little sound bar at the bottom right corner of the video on this page, but on the Google video player for the external usb video, its on the bottom right next to the status bar.

  117. business September 17, 2008 1:44 pm #

    Thank you so much! Being a computer layman, sort of, took me forever to figure out the jumper part. Wow. Passing along to the co-workers. Thanks!

  118. Jay September 17, 2008 3:56 pm #

    Thanks Michael! SUPER MEGA HELPFUL!!!

  119. Jay September 17, 2008 4:01 pm #

    The video has no sound…

  120. nigel halling September 20, 2008 2:41 am #

    i have a harddrive which is corrupted iwant to use it as aslave how can i clear files refomate it as it was from an evo to hp tower without corupting my new pc

  121. Dan September 28, 2008 6:39 pm #

    Hi, I have a laptop that has been corrupted and will not boot. How can I slave that drive to my desktop PC in order to remove important files? Does the laptop need to be taken apart or can this be done in a cable connection?

  122. DTI Data Recovery September 29, 2008 9:28 am #

    Nigel,

    If it is connected as a slave it won’t corrupt your computer. You can use our software to extract the data, then you can go ahead and format it.

    What operating system where you using. I need to know the file system of the corrupt frive to give you the right software.

  123. DTI Data Recovery September 29, 2008 9:30 am #

    Dan,
    You are going to have to remove the hard drive from the laptop. What kind of laptop is it?

    Once you have removed the hard drive follow the instruction in our:
    How To Slave A Laptop Hard Drive Using USB Enclosure Video

  124. nigel halling October 3, 2008 7:12 pm #

    nigel halling back on foratting my old harddrive i have since got another and i had formatted the drive thanks for your help ive got the old one so not needed have a nice weekend

  125. Tina October 10, 2008 4:27 pm #

    We recently purchased a new computer, as our old computer died on us – we apparently had a pirated version of Windows XP, and upon installing software to bypass the WGA so I could get the Service Pack updates I must have done something wrong as when I restarted, I could no longer get past the log in screen for XP. No huge deal, we needed a new computer anyhow and didn’t want to put the money in to have the old one fixed because it was junk.

    Now my issue is how to retrieve the important files from the old hard drive. My new hard drive is a SATA and there is no ribbon cable. If I purchase a cable to connect the two computers to pull the files off, will I be able to access the files even though I cannot access Windows on the old computer? I’m assuming I would need to power up the old computer to access the files but will I be able to retrieve them without logging in to Windows? Is there any advice you can give me on making this the easiest, most painless process possible?

    I appreciate any help. Thanks.

  126. Keith Kent October 14, 2008 1:11 am #

    This is a very good example of real help instead of advertising.

    I hate asking a question in this box but does Windows Vista (On a del computer) and the computer I want to use to slave it is using Windows XP Home Edition. I’m guessing this won’t work but it’s worth a shot. Since I hate Vista and dealing with it.

  127. DTI Data Recovery October 14, 2008 9:41 am #

    Keith,

    There should be no issues slaving a Vista hard drive to an XP hard drive or visa versa. Both operating systems use the NTFS file system so you should be able to connect the hard drive and pull the data off. If for some reason the drive isn’t recognized in Windows we have software that can pull the data off.

  128. DTI Data Recovery October 14, 2008 9:43 am #

    Tina, sorry for the delay in getting back to you. There are adapters that can hook a SATA drive into an IDE ribbon, or even the other way around. You should only have to pull out the drive and slave it to recover your data. Call us if you have any questions about it. 727-345-9665

  129. jantree October 15, 2008 3:00 am #

    I attempted to install a second hard drive onto my desktop, one from an external (maxtor 3200,100gb) that I took apart, following the instructions on the tutorial. However, when I attempted to start up the machine nothing happened. The light on the power button lit up, but the computer did not start. I have successfully hooked up a different hard drive to this machine, but my maxtor drive didn’t work. Is my drive fried? What can I do?

  130. DTI Data Recovery October 15, 2008 11:04 am #

    jantree,

    Was the external hard drive functioning before you removed it from its case? Did you try to hook it back through the case? Usually if a computer won’t boot with one hard drive in it, but will when a different one is installed, it means there is a problem with that hard drive. Did you set the jumpers on the Maxtor to make it a slave?

  131. DTI Data Recovery October 15, 2008 2:05 pm #

    OK, it is more than likely an electronic issue with the hard drive, we can look at it and know in seconds what the problem is. When a hard drive’s electronics get fried the worst case scenario is that the heads get damaged from the discharge. Hopefully that is not the case with yours. Feel free to give us a call and we can give you a quote for hard drive recovery.

    1-866-438-6932

  132. jantree October 15, 2008 1:54 pm #

    While in its original case, I accidentally hooked the hard drive up to my laptop power cable. It obviously did not work. After plugging in the proper cable, the power light blinked rapidly instead of staying lit and the drive did not spin. This apparently indicates that the drive is not being powered due to some part of power source being damaged. The recommendation was to open the case and hook the drive up to a desktop to see if the drive itself was damaged. I did set the drive to slave.

  133. jantree October 15, 2008 8:40 pm #

    Thanks a lot for the info!

  134. DTI Data Recovery October 21, 2008 2:27 pm #

    importenthused,

    DO NOT FORMAT THE DRIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    More than likely you have a partition problem. We have some great software that can recover your data. It is called DART XP and you can run the demo to see if it will recover your data before you pay for it. You can download the demo here.

    Do you have space to move the recovered data to? An external hard drive or the main drive will work if you have enough free space on the drive. You can call 727-345-9665 and ask for technical support if you have any questions or post them here.

  135. DTI Data Recovery October 21, 2008 2:41 pm #

    NP you want to make sure you have someplace to put the data to, the bad drive could get worse at any moment!

  136. DTI Data Recovery October 21, 2008 3:20 pm #

    It used to be that Dell would throw the cheapest hard drives that they could get into their PC’s, but now they are using better drives. I think one of the issues they need to deal with is educating users on their options with RAID drives. They offer systems for with both RAID 1 and RAID 0, but they don;t do a good job of explaining the difference to people. RAID 0 computers are very dangerous because if one of the drives fail, the user is screwed. A RAID 1 mirrors the first hard drive so if one fails the user won’t lose data. I had a Dell laptop that was only 2 weeks old loose a hard drive a few months ago. It wasn’t Dell’s fault and they actually had pretty good support. The hard drive was a Hitachi which is a pretty good hard drive. The fact is all hard drives fail, in fact they come out of the factory with bad sectors. That is why they have sector maps. My wife wrote a great post about it called Hard Drives a Destiny Of Failure that explains what hard drive manufacturers have to deal with. Being a hard drive recovery company we see every hard drive made. They are all pretty much the same when it comes to failure rate. At this time the best thing to do is go with the capacity and speed that you need, but to do whatever you can to keep your data backed up.

  137. DTI Data Recovery October 21, 2008 3:30 pm #

    So did Fujitsu, at one time every single Fujitsu hard drive in the MPG and MPF line failed. It turned out to be something that we were able to recover from remotely, but it still was bad for their users. We see a lot of Toshiba hard drives that have failed bearings. That seams to be their biggest problem, I didn’t know about the monitors though

  138. importenthused October 21, 2008 2:00 pm #

    I had a WINXP drive that won’t boot, period. i tried all i could so i slaved it to another XP machine. It’s saying i need to format the drive. Should I? i’m afraid it’ll erase the data.

  139. importenthused October 21, 2008 2:36 pm #

    yeah i have 2 external hard drives and 1 extra internal for the PC’s drive that did crash. I figured i shouldn’t format the drive. Thanks.

  140. importenthused October 21, 2008 2:43 pm #

    heh. that’s what i get for getting a D*ll ! heh.

  141. importenthused October 21, 2008 3:24 pm #

    Toshiba put out a huge line a faulty Laptop screens. I work for Circuit City and bought one, and replaced it 3 times until i gave up. Every single one had one or more Dead pixels within’ the monitor somewhere. Ridiculous !

  142. Seth October 23, 2008 7:25 pm #

    I have a Dell Dimension 8300. My hard drive went out and I need to recover my files from it. I’m getting another hard drive tomorrow. I was looking over the slave diagrams and just wanted to make sure I understand it correctly before I try it. My old hard drive has a 4 prong connector in it and inside my dimension 8300, I see 2 jumpers that look like they would fit in it. I just wanted to know if all I have to do is plug one of those jumpers into the back of my old hard drive so that I can pull my important files from it? Thanks for any help you can give.

  143. DTI Data Recovery October 24, 2008 10:07 am #

    Seth,
    are you talking about the power connectors? Make sure you have the same types of hard drives, in other words SATA or IDE. The 4 prong cable is for power on an IDE hard drive. Take a look at this post about hard drive form factors. It has a video that might shed some light on the different types of hard drives. If you have any doubts at all, please give us a call at 727-345-9665 or leave another comment. We will do what we can to help you out.

  144. DTI Data Recovery October 24, 2008 1:46 pm #

    Seth,

    I just forwarded your comment to Jacqui, she will be able to sort this out for you. If you need an answer right now, give her a call at 727-345-9665 and tell the receptionist you need software tech support.

  145. Seth October 24, 2008 1:40 pm #

    My old hard drive and the new hard drive I recieved today are both SATA drives. I’m just trying to find out what cable in the computer to plug into my old hard drive so that I can try and retrieve my old files from it. There’s like 5 different cables in there to choose from and I’m not sure which one is the right one or what port on my old hard drive to connect it to. My new hard drive has 3 connectors in the back of it and my old one has 4 slots with one of them plugged. Any help on which of the 4 slots on my old hard and what cable inside the computer to connect to it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for the help so far.

  146. Seth October 24, 2008 2:52 pm #

    Ok thanks. Right now I’m having problems installing windows xp on my new hard drive. I keep getting the following message every time I restart the computer. strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility. I’m not sure if there is some other issue here besides the hard drive or not? Thanks for the help.

  147. Seth October 24, 2008 9:38 pm #

    I think my cd rom drive went out in my desktop and that’s why I’m unable to install my os. I bought a new cd rom drive but the computer isn’t reconizing it. Do I need to do more than just take the old one out and put the new one in? Or can I put my hard drive in a friends computer with a working cd rom drive and install windows xp that way and then put it back in my computer. Any help would be great. Thanks.

  148. DTI Data Recovery October 25, 2008 11:42 am #

    Seth,

    You can’t put your new hard drive in another computer and load an operating system unless EVERY device is exactly the same. You shouldn’t have a problem replacing the CD drive if it is set up as a master device on the IDE chain. It sounds like there might either be a BIOS setting or worse case a motherboard issue. When you reboot the computer and it asks you to go to the setup utility, have you done that? It should show you the order in which your boot devices are set up. If your CD drive is seen in the BIOS you can make that the first boot device and you should be able to install the OS that way, but the issue is getting the CD drive recognized. I am on call this weekend so call me at 727-345-9665 and I can see if we can get this sorted out.

  149. bobby October 26, 2008 4:33 am #

    im trying to slave a maxtor one touch external hardrive to my e-machines computer. in the computer there is an extra slot, and extra power cord/ jacks to hook up the hard drive. i removed the jumper, hooked up the cables and put the slaved drive in….but when i put it in, and turn my computer on, the light comes on, but nothing is working inside, so my problem is.

    -after putting the slaved drive in. and pressing the power button to turn the computer on. my computer shows no sign of life at all, as if its getting no power, but the front light lights up as if it was on. is there a possible solution to this.

  150. Jason October 26, 2008 10:41 am #

    I have an HP where the mother board went out and need to get files off my hardrive. When I slaved it everything went fine till i went in to the owner’s docs and said I do not have authorization to access those files. how do I get pass this?

  151. Seth October 26, 2008 12:32 pm #

    I finally got my new hard drive installed, up and running yesterday morning. I had to go into my BIOS and disable my dvd drive for it to boot up from the cd on the other drive. So my old drive is still good and Dell was wrong, telling me it was bad. Now all I have to do is try and get my files from my old hard drive. I was thinking about trying an external hard drive enclosure again. Do you now if the OS has to be the same on each hard drive? I tried an external hard drive enclosure already but my laptop wanted me to format it. My old hard drive has XP Home and my laptop has XP Media Center. I’m not sure if that’s why I couldn’t get my old files off or not. That’s why I was going to try and hook it up to my desktop since the hard drives would have the same OS. Thanks for the help.

  152. DTI Data Recovery October 27, 2008 10:22 am #

    Seth,

    The operating systems do not have to be the same. Do you know what file system is used on the XP Media Center drive? It is set up as NTFS by default, but it could also be FAT 32. Knowing this will tell me what the best software would be to recover your data. We have a great free program that will work on FAT 32 and an inexpensive solution for NTFS. If you can let me know which file system you are using we can get you an answer.

  153. DTI Data Recovery October 27, 2008 10:24 am #

    bobby,

    Was the Maxtor One Touch hard drive damaged? Did you have trouble with it before adding it as a slave? If there are electronic problems with a hard drive it can cause the machine to not boot. Try taking it out and see if the machine boots. Also make sure the power connections are correct.

  154. DTI Data Recovery October 27, 2008 10:27 am #

    Jason,

    Did you access the drive through Windows Explorer, or with recovery software? We have software that will get the files off. What operating system is on the old HP hard drive, and what OS is on the computer you are using to recover the data?

  155. DTI Data Recovery October 28, 2008 1:37 pm #

    I was recently asked where a user could buy speed clone, a powerful data recovery tool that makes sector by sector copies of hard drives. If you need speed clone click on the buy now button below.
    Buy Speed Clone Now

  156. DTI Data Recovery October 28, 2008 5:01 pm #

    Rick,

    Is the drive you slaved seen in My Computer as a drive, or if not is it seen in the Disk Manager? You can find that by right clicking on My Computer hit manage, then hit disk manager. This should show the drive. If it asks you to format it.. DONT DO IT!!! If the drive isn’t seen there reboot and verify that the BIOS sees the drive. If it doesn’t, check to make sure the jumpers on the back of the drive are set right for slave or master. Call me at 727-345-9665 if you have any questions or reply in here.

  157. rick October 28, 2008 4:00 pm #

    ok i have a simple question…i have both drives connected…pc booted up…but i have no idea how to access the files from the drive im trying to get them from. the OS on the pc that the 2 are connected is WinXP Pro and the OS on the drive im trying to retrieve the files from is WinXP Home. please help!

  158. vicente October 28, 2008 11:36 pm #

    i want to recover some files deleted accidentally they are very important for my job; im using my laptop, so , does it work if i install a recovery software in a desktop as a host and try to undelete files mapping the drive of my laptop???? if this is not possible what should i do?!?!

  159. Carolyn October 29, 2008 8:07 am #

    I know nothing about computers as you can tell. I bought a new HP Compaq Presario. My old PC is a very old Gatway running ME.
    I have years of Geneolagy files on a GEDCOM program. I tried to run backup disks thinking I could restore the info. Then I downloaded the Gedcom. program to the new PC. When I tried to restore the info all I had were read only disks!!! Can I slave my old hard drive to my new system to recover my program? And once you slave a hard drive do you leave it that way after you have recovered the files you want to save ? Can you run from two hard drives.? HELP

  160. DTI Data Recovery October 29, 2008 3:07 pm #

    vicente,
    I need more info. You deleted files from what? Your laptop? What operating system is the drive that you deleted file from using?

    You want to be careful about installing anything to the drive that the files were deleted from. We have software that will run from a cd, floppy, or a flash drive, but you will need a place to put the recovered data to as well.

  161. DTI Data Recovery October 29, 2008 3:12 pm #

    Carolyn,

    If you move the files from the disks to the hard drive you can change them all from read only by selecting all files, right clicking and uncheck the read only box. That will make then writable.

    You can slave the old hard drive and get the files off, but not the programs. Is the version of GEDCOM you installed on the HP the same as the whats on the Gateway?
    If not we need to know if the new version is backward compatible with your recovered files. Give me a call at 727-345-9665 and I can answer your questions and we can figure this out. DTI Data offers free support!

  162. DTI Data Recovery October 29, 2008 4:09 pm #

    Seth,

    I know I don’t have to tell you not to format your drive because that will erase your data. This is a partition problem that we can help you solve without a doubt.

    The best thing to do is to download the demo of DART XP. Once you have installed it, have it scan your old drive. It will show you that it can recover your files before you pay for it. It’s $49 and you can buy it right from the program so you don’t have to re-install it or rescan it.

    If you need help call the support line at 727-345-9665 and ask for software support or choose that option if you call after 5:30 PM EST, they answer the phone until 10 PM EST. If for some reason you can’t get through, you can call me direct at 727-345-9665 and I can help you.

    We do have a free NTFS partition repair tool, but that might be overkill for your situation you can follow that link and see if you are into repairing the partition. Here is the main NTFS Partition program download which has the download and other instructions.

    Honestly, DART XP is the easiest tool to run so that is my recommendation.

  163. Seth October 29, 2008 3:52 pm #

    Ok, I just put my old hard drive into my desktop after I had to buy a cable to go from the hard drive to the 2nd slot on the motherboard. Both OS are XP Home. When I boot up the computer, it reconizes the drive. Then when I select the drive, to see what’s on it so that I can save the files from it, it gives me a message saying the hard drive is not formatted and then ask me if I want to format it. It seems like its going to be hopeless to get my files from it. I’m not sure what else to do. The only changes in the system from the old hard drive to the new one is that I installed 4 gig of RAM from 1 gig and put a 512 MB graphics card in from the 256 MB. Thanks for your help.

  164. Dan Veith October 29, 2008 8:51 pm #

    I have a pc infected with a trojan virus and I was wondering if I could take the hard drive from that pc and make it a slave drive on another computer in order to run antivirus scans on it safely from that computer? Would I just follow the steps listed on this page?

  165. vicente October 30, 2008 12:06 am #

    thanks for your attention

    as i told you I delted some files (pdf`s and word documents) they were in my laptop and it is running on windows xp home SP2, if you need any aditional info,please let me know, because it would be glad to recover that info

  166. Seth October 30, 2008 5:47 am #

    Thanks for the help. I’ll try it. If I have any problems I’ll definately give you guys a call.

  167. Seth October 30, 2008 7:13 am #

    Hi Michael, I used Dart XP and when I did it gave me a message saying “there have been bad sectors read.” What does this mean? I was going to try and use the NTFS partition repair tool but when I read about it, it says about putting values in the partition and clicking on write. I’m not even sure what values to use. Maybe you have a better suggestion for me. Thanks for your time and quick responses.

  168. Jacqui Best October 30, 2008 12:48 pm #

    Seth,

    Bad sectors read mean that the drive has suffered some kind of physical damage. You have 2 courses of action here. Either you can download and run the demo of Recover It All professional which will have a better chance of making it past the bad area of the disk or you can send the drive in for a n evaluation of the extent of the physical damage. I would be interested in walking you through any problems you are having with the software. You can reach me at 727-345-9665 ext 236

  169. Jacqui Best October 30, 2008 12:53 pm #

    Dan,

    Yes this is a one way to run the virus scanning software. The problem I foresee with this is that you will run into a problem with viruses that only activate the the drive is booting. A better course of action who be booting in safe mode and allowing a higher end scanner like Norton to take care of the problems.

  170. Jacqui Best October 30, 2008 12:56 pm #

    Vicente,

    You can not do data recovery on a mapped network drive. Data recovery software need physical access to the disk and network mapping does not allow that. My advice is that you remove the drive from the laptop and put it in an external usb enclosure. Removal of a laptop disk is fairly straight forward and the USB chassis is very reasonably priced.

  171. Edgar Escobar November 2, 2008 1:41 pm #

    Hi , hey i did every to told me to …. but now the computer start and just goes into a black screen it doesnt even show the bios anymore ‘???

  172. Edgar Escobar November 2, 2008 2:00 pm #

    Ok, i had a friends computer stop with an 0x24 message. i was trying to slave his drive into my computer that way i could run the ch….. to fix or try , but now that the drive is slave into my computer my computer doesnt want to start … it shows the begining of windows and everything but it doesnt go anywhere after that . The computer just freeze …. What can i do ????

  173. Jacqui Best November 3, 2008 11:49 am #

    Edgar,

    A lot of times there is so much damage to a disk that windows will not allow a perfectly good drive to boot with the bad drive slaved in. There is a work around though, we have to FOOL windows. What you can do is get yourself an external USB chassis or a usb to ide(sata) cable and wait for windows to boot then connect this drive and see if can try the recovery that way. This is how we trick windows most times when it refuses to boot with a drive on the internal IDE channel.

  174. kevin b November 3, 2008 1:21 pm #

    i have slaved 2nd hd from another comp put in mine,ineed to get pics off it. can not get into user account (pass word protected i know the pass word) how do i get xp to ask me for pass word
    ty kevin

  175. Edgar Escobar November 4, 2008 5:39 am #

    Thank you , first off all and sorry for the stupid question , but where can i get a USB chassis or a usb to ide(sata) cable ????

  176. GratefulToYou November 5, 2008 5:26 pm #

    Thank you, Thank you, Thank you. I ran across your site the other night. I was getting the infamous BSOD and couldn’t even get windows to repair itself with the install disk. With your instructions I was able to slave the icky hd to my good hd in my home personal computer, get all the VIP files like word files and excel files and such off the bad hd and onto the good hd, then I was able to format the bad hd and make it all better. If it weren’t for your site I was afraid I was going to lose all of the files that I needed so badly. So thank you, thank you, thank you. You guys are wonderful for having this here!

  177. Kendall Wright November 5, 2008 8:57 pm #

    Hi i’ve been building machines now for several years, but this is my first time to retrieve info from an old hard drive, i did everything already that u said to do, but when i turned on the computer, it read new hard drive found and installed in the task bar in win xp, but it doesn’t show up in “my computer” thanks

  178. Kendall Wright November 5, 2008 9:02 pm #

    sorry forgot to mention that the machine im putting it in, the master drive is a sata, and the slave is an ide ata. thanks again!

  179. sherri November 5, 2008 9:14 pm #

    i have a toshiba satellite laptop computer with windows xp os. it just crashed one day. i was wondering how to connect this tiny hard drive to my desktop to attempt to recover data. pictures, step by step would be appreciated. thanks!

  180. jamws November 6, 2008 11:03 am #

    ok my master hard drive has a spot that says slave in use do I need to jump those as well I knlow that you need to have the master on master and the slave on slave but I am wondering if the other ones on the master need to be jumped as well for it to work thanks

  181. linda November 13, 2008 6:08 pm #

    I have a compaq presario soooo desktop. I don’t know to much about computers. At first it starts up and then I hear a humming noise and it freezes up. Can you please help me?

    THANKS

  182. DTI Data Recovery November 14, 2008 11:23 am #

    Linda,

    While it is starting do you here a beep? A single beep is called a POST and that tells us that the hardware used to start your computer is working. If you get a beep then the screen should show you the storage devices attached to your computer.

    Can you see your hard drive in the BIOS? That is the first black screen that comes up after the beep.

    Feel free to call us at 866-438-6932 if you need help finding these things out.

  183. DTI Data Recovery November 16, 2008 2:35 pm #

    kilo,

    What operating system is on the virus damaged hard drive?

    If it is XP or Vista we have some software that will recover your files no problem. If it an older operating system with a FAT 32 file system we have free software, if it is NTFS you will need DART XP which is on sale right now. You can download DART XP and it will show you the data before you buy it. For info on DART XP Data Recovery Software click here.

  184. DTI Data Recovery November 16, 2008 4:44 pm #

    kilo,

    bad sectors are pretty bad. You can try the demo of Recover It All which is a more advanced program.
    Here is more info on Recover It All

    After you scan the drive with Recover It All, SAVE THE SCAN that way you won’t have to run it again. Give us a call if you need some help 1-866-438-6932

  185. DTI Data Recovery November 16, 2008 4:46 pm #

    If the demo of Recover It All doesn’t work, you might have to clone the drive. That would require another hard drive that is at least as big or bigger than the damaged one. You can call for Tech support 727-345-9665 and hit the option for software tech support.

  186. kilo November 16, 2008 2:16 pm #

    hi-

    i have a hard drive im trying to pull data off of. I have hooked it up to another machine as a slave, and it powers up, and recognizes it as a G: drive in My Computer. I cannot open it, it only asks me to format it. I know it is not damaged, I just got a virus and could not start up windows, and I want to get all the files I can, before I reinstall windows on my other machine. What is the best option to do this? Thanks.

  187. kilo November 16, 2008 3:54 pm #

    I am running XP and the infected machine was XP. I have downloaded Dart XP. I ran it and it keeps saying “there have been bad sectors read.” It allowed me to see all the files that I wanted, they all seemed to be there and intact. when I tried to copy them, it copied so many, and now is repeating this message, such as etc. and up to now about bad sectors read. I keep clicking ok, but that is all I can do, and it doesnt even allow enough time to click “stop.” this message just keeps popping up with more and more sectors, and all i can do is click ok and it will not go anywhere. so what am i supposed to do now?

  188. DTI Data Recovery November 20, 2008 4:54 pm #

    Sarah T,

    There are adaptors that can do it here is an example. I typed “SATA to IDE converter” into Google to find it. They also make SATA to USB external cases. That might be easier, but hooking it up to your IDE chain would be the best for hard drive recovery.

  189. Sarah T November 20, 2008 4:24 pm #

    OKay, I have a Western Digital in my HP desktop which is connected with a SATA cable and no IDE slots. I want to slave a Maxtor (which has no SATA slots, and is hooked up in a Dell with IDE). How can I do it?

  190. Ray Percival November 25, 2008 6:03 am #

    Hi can you help me i purchased a 160gb hard drive as i want to use it as a slave so i did what your surpossed to do put the jumper to slave put the power supply in and the IDE cable when i booted it up i got two bleeps so can you tell me what i have done wrong

  191. DTI Data Recovery November 25, 2008 11:40 am #

    Ray,
    The 2 beeps mean different things on different motherboards. Do you know what type of motherboard you have? Also check that the main hard drive that was already in your computer is set as a master with the jumpers, as well as the new drive being set as a slave. Also check the power connection to make sure it is in the right way.

  192. Jovan December 8, 2008 10:36 pm #

    I have a WD360GD (Western Digital 36Gb Raptor) SATA that stopped loading Windows XP the other day. I would get to the screen telling me to choose “Safe Mode, Safe Mode with Networking, Last working version, or regular Windows start-up … doesn’t matter which choice is made, the computer restarts and goes through this cycle endlessly. I’m 99% sure it’s a bad sector.

    I have bought a new SATA Hitachi 80Gb, installed XP today, and have put the old Raptor in as “slave”. In “My Computer” the drive shows up as E:, Basic File Partition, no file system, Healthy (active) status, 100% free space (of 34.46Gb), No fault tolerance, and 0% overhead. In trying to open (explore) the drive, an error window pops up stating “E: is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable.”

    Question is can I salvage my e-mail contacts in Internet Explorer, my e-mails in Internet Explorer, my bookmarks in Internet Explorer, and pretty well everything else I have?

    Please help.

  193. Jacqui Best December 9, 2008 2:31 pm #

    Jovan,

    I would run the demo of DART XP. When the software comes up chose the “physical” drive not the logical drive letter. Let us scan the drive when that scan finishes you should have something that says “Rebuilt Drive 0” select thatand click next. Hopefully the software will then tree the drive, if it does just purchase the software for 49.00 and move your data off the drive. I believe your guess is correct that the drive has bad sectors, because if it was just simple file corruption to the boot area of the drive then you should be able to access it when it is slaved with out 3rd party software help.

  194. meena December 9, 2008 4:40 pm #

    Hi

    in order to set right a problem the hard drive in my laptop was replaced but with no backups to the files
    how do i recover files from the old hard drive removed from the laptop

  195. Ernie Clark December 10, 2008 6:31 pm #

    Hello, I have a couple qustions, they are legit to me. Does the slave drive, from the pci I want to recover from and the (I’ll call it the primary pc hd), do they have to have the same OS?

    Secondly: I think I will have no problem removing and installin the slave dr., however, once I get that done then what am I to look for or do? Really dumb, but where am I recovering to? Does the info go to the primary pc HD or where is this inf being sent? I have replaced all sorts of pc parts including MB but this is all new to me.
    Thanks a lot folks, Click1934@aol.com

  196. Jacqui Best December 11, 2008 3:35 pm #

    meena,

    Depending on what is wrong with the drive will be the advice I give you.

    If it is just a few bad sectors then I would advise buying an external laptop hard drive chassis

  197. Jacqui Best December 11, 2008 3:48 pm #

    Ernie Clark,

    Answer to Question 1:

    No they do not have to be the same operating system BUT lets say you’re MAIN pc drive is windows XP it will be able to read most windows base file systems but not mac or linux. If the Main PC is booting in to windows me or windows 98 it will not be able to read ANY ntfs file system ( winxp 2k NT4) so it is dependant on what the boot drive is and what the slave WAS formatted with if you will be able to read it.

    Answer to Question 2:

    You will ALWAYS be recovering to any drive BUT the affected drive. You never want to put data down on to a drive you are trying to recover from. As far as how you will gain access to the data it is dependent upon what is wrong with the drive. It could be that you boot up and see it in you “My Computer” and are able to fully access the data. You may need 3rd party software to gain access to the drive.

    Without knowing what is wrong with the drive and why you are slaving it I can not give you a complete answer but if you would like to let me know what happened I may better be able to direct you to the proper answer.

  198. Ernie C. December 14, 2008 8:20 pm #

    Jacqui, thanks very much for your help on slaving a drive for data recovery. I will let you know what happens.
    Thanks again
    EC

  199. chris Dewees December 17, 2008 6:48 pm #

    Question I downloaded some type of trojin and I have anti virus yet it says no viruses found. now my computer runs VERY slow and sometimes won’t even boot up. I want to take all my data like pics and movies and documents off the harddrive and put it on a new computer so i can wipe the old drive clean and reformat it. is there a way to get data off a harddrive that won’t boot up. and can i only copy the stuff I want and not the possable virus I downloaded. Please help

    thanks

    chris

  200. TONY December 22, 2008 1:34 am #

    I have an external hard drive MAXTOR. In the process of deleting some files from the external hard drive, the PC froze … When I tried to restart the PC the external drive did not respond any more. You can hear the humming as when it used to start but when the time comes to show up on the PC it never happens… You can see the green light, trying to start but it just gets stucked.. and the blinking on the drive continues but there in no autplay to start it automatically, there is a drive E in the PC but it does not open. When I try to explore it from my computer.. the computer slows down or gets stalled for a while until I press the escape button. Is there any way to recover the files from the external hard disk?? Thanks for the attention given to this message. TONY

  201. monkeybun December 23, 2008 1:58 am #

    Great post. I would like to know how to do this with my dell precision m6300. Recently had an error message that hal.dll is missing and computer won’t boot. tried all the solutions out there with no luck. someone mentioned that I need to take my hard drive out, then install it (or slave it) to another computer, get the data backed up, then place back in laptop and do reinstall of xp. I have NEVER ever opened a computer, so any suggestions on where I might look to see what to do (besides this tutorial?) Also, what will I need to buy to get the laptop hard drive hooked up to my desktop’s so I can do what I need to?

    Thanks a million!

  202. DTI Data Recovery December 26, 2008 2:56 pm #

    Chris,

    You can follow the instructions in this post to slave the drive and copy off your files. Be careful to not copy any Internet files, and run virus scans on all files you copy. If you know what type of trojan you have, we can tell you how to eliminate it before moving the data off of the infected hard drive. Call us at 866-438-6932 if you have questions.

  203. DTI Data Recovery December 26, 2008 3:05 pm #

    Tony,

    Have you tried to take the drive out of the external case and hool t up to your computer as a slave? That would be a good way to determine if your BIOS can see the hard drive. If the BIOS can see the drive you will be able to scan the drive with our software DART XP which will show you the data before you buy it.

  204. prkrsdad December 26, 2008 12:41 pm #

    I have a Gateway compute running windows vista home and I would like to take the hard drive out of my old HP and use it for extra storage. There is currently nothing on the old drive( I was going to try to put XP on it but decided to just buy a new computer) Can this be done? Also, do I have to buy an enclosure or can I just make one myself. (I kind of like to do things the hard way which isn’t good given my tendency to be mildly retarded when it comes to anything electronic) Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

  205. rick December 27, 2008 3:11 pm #

    is there a way to set up master/ slave from a laptop hard drive.

    i have other laptop also a tower what connectors do i need to buy

    thanks

  206. Chet December 30, 2008 7:29 pm #

    I have read your artile about slaving a hard drive to recover the info on it. I have done all the step but windows xp does not recognize the drive. It shows up in the bios, and in the disk manager, but does not have a drive letter assigned to it. rescaning the drive does nothing. What should I do next?
    Thanks for any help.
    Chet

  207. Vernon Ellis January 1, 2009 11:02 am #

    I connected hard drive number 2 as a slave but windows can not see it.
    the fist time i made the connection I did see a bios srceen at that time i did’t
    and still know what to do at that point and I still don’t

  208. DTI Data Recovery January 2, 2009 11:29 am #

    Rick,

    You can set up a master/slave with a laptop using a USB or firewire hard drive enclosure. The other way is to use a laptop adapter to convert it to IDE or SATA depending upon your tower’s motherboard. There are tons of websites including tigerdirect and newegg that sell the right adapter.

    Here are links to videos we have to show you how to do it:

    Slaving laptop hard drive with USB connector

  209. DTI Data Recovery January 2, 2009 11:36 am #

    Chet, what operating system (or file system) was on the drive you are slaving? When you see it in disk manager does it show the partition as healthy? Does it say what type of partition it is i.e. extended, primary, etc. Are you trying to get data off the drive or use it as a future storage device?

  210. DTI Data Recovery January 2, 2009 11:40 am #

    Vernon,

    This is a common issue, what was on the drive you are trying to slave? Sometimes the file system can interfere with XP’s ability to see a parttion.

    Many times this can happen because the jumpers aren’t set up right. Can you check them and make sure that your master dirve is set up as a master, and the slave is set up as a slave. When you restart the computer and the disks are shown you can hit the pause key on your keyboard and it will freeze the screen so you can see what the bios is saying about your hard drives.

  211. Lee January 3, 2009 10:58 am #

    Hi there,
    I followed your tut and managed to remove the old hard drive from my computer, I moved the little white plastic I assume jumper to slave. Now when I install this into my other computer how can i move files. Can i just copy and paste the ones I want to move?
    I am not even sure the drive is corrupt but my computer shut down and keeps rebooting into chkdsk and repeats over and over. Chkdsk does repairs and repeats. But the computer keeps rebooting. It ususally gets to the desktop and then shuts off and repeats.
    I would like to recover some graphics and documents off the drive for now. And later when I can afford it take the whole old computer in to see whats really wrong. I just want to make sure this drive can not damage my other computer when its installed as a slave. And can I safely leave it in there until I can manage to recover my files.
    Also is there any way to see a file is corrupt before I try to copy it. I dont want to bring anything over that may hurt the computer host.
    I am not real savvy on all this. But I have changed memory, modems and installed new switches, so I have no fear of opening up the pc as long as I have good directions. (I actually enjoy doing this though)
    Thanks

    • Jacqui Best January 5, 2009 5:58 pm #

      Lee,
      You should be able to just copy and paste the data from the affected drive to the current drive. I can not be sure what EXACTLY is wrong with the affected drive but I would tentatively say that in most cases the situation you have should cause NO problems to the host machine. There really is no way to tell if a file is “corrupt” and I would venture to guess most of your files are fine and the real problem lies in the system area of the drive. The problem you are having with the disk is indicative of either a) bad sectors in a very unfortunate place b) Master File table corruption or c) a virus (which more than likely does not reside in your DATA files). Hope this helps if you have any more questions please let me know

  212. Chet January 5, 2009 10:18 am #

    Michael
    The drive I am trying to recover has Windows 2000 as the OS. The drive comes uo in disc manager as being active and healthy. it shows all the info, such as size and percent available. I would like to recover some info from it and then use it for storage. If I cant recover the info, I am would like to use it for storage.
    Chet

    • Jacqui Best January 5, 2009 6:06 pm #

      Chet,

      Is windows assigning a drive letter to it?

  213. Will January 5, 2009 7:19 pm #

    Hey guys,

    My older computer was having many issues such as what I call the “Blue Screen of Death” where it shows a screen stating that windows is shutting down to prevent damage to my system. So a friend has put together another computer for me (trade out) and I have slaved my old hard drive onto the new computer in the disk drive. It recognizes it under my computer but it asks me to format it… I deffinately DO NOT want to do that. Too many important files. So, What is my next option to save my stuff. Either utilizing my old HDD or there is plenty of room on the new one. 🙂 thanks

    • Jacqui Best January 6, 2009 11:20 am #

      Will,
      The original drive or “OLD” Hard drive, what was it formatted with originally?

      If it is NTFS then I would recommend the Dart XP Software if it was FAT32 then I would recommend the Recover It All Professional software. Both pieces are about the same price so it is really up to you.

      Also it is likely I could come in and fix the drive and put it back to the way it was before what ever happened .. happened.. It is called a Remote Logical recovery. I can take control of your desktop and use sector editing software in order to fix what ever had gone wrong with the “system” area of the drive. That usually cost between 100-150 bucks. If you have any questions about the software or the logical recovery please feel free to call me at 727-345-9665 ext 236

  214. Lee January 5, 2009 6:08 pm #

    Thanks Jacqui,
    I was able to slave the drive and its doing perfect.
    I am inclined to think its my actual windows that is corrupt, or some other component on the pc, only because I have no problem accessing anything on the drive as a slave. Files open an are easily accesed.
    Once I get all my files moved, i may try a total reinstall. I really am comfortable with that old pc, it has always perormed wonderfully even after 7 years of heavy usage. I do have a new laptop and another newer pc, but hate working on either.
    And vista keeps me from even considering a new pc all together.
    Thanks

    • Jacqui Best January 6, 2009 11:14 am #

      Lee,

      I know that Dell is offering new pc’s preloaded with Windows XP Pro edition that they ship with a Vista cd for later upgrading if you so chose. This option is a little more expensive since they have to build in the price of 2 operating systems but is the way I am recommending people who are not in love with Vista go.

  215. Chet January 6, 2009 9:37 am #

    No, Windows is not giving it a drive letter. It shows up in the bios as a active drive,and it shows up in disc manager as a active healthy drive, but I cannot access it.
    Chet

    • Jacqui Best January 6, 2009 11:25 am #

      Chet,

      It is likely an issue with the partition sector of the drive, but I can not be certain unless I was to see the drive. You have a few options.
      1. You can download and run the Demo’s of either DART XP or Recover It All Professional if you see your files you can then purchase the software for about $50 and recover the lost data to another drive.

      2. You could have me come in remotely to the drive and fix it back the way it was before this happened. You will not have to transfer off the data or do anything for that matter it will just be like this whole thing never happened. That cost it $100-$150 depending on the time it is going to take me to fix it remotely.

      I can be reached at 727-345-9665 ext 236 if you need any help with the software or would like me to remote in.

  216. mike January 6, 2009 2:33 pm #

    Hi, I have a bit of a problem, and I know it’s a simple solution. I have two hard drives, a 40 gb (which I run my os on), and a160gb western digital for media. I started having problems with the hard drive I run my os on, so I decided to use the 160 for my os and install windows xp on it. Well it didn’t go well, and I got a blue screen after I installed windows. So I decided to switch my setup the way it was so I can continue to use my computer. So when I tried to access the files on the 160 hard drive. I got a message: drive e if not formatted. would you like to format now? So I can’t access the files on my second hard drive. I don’t know what’s the problem? Did I change something when I installed windows on the second hard drive? Can u still use a hard drive as a backup harddrive, or for files if it has windows installed on it? please help

    • Jacqui Best January 7, 2009 3:27 pm #

      Mike,

      You should be able to, Windows being installed on it should not have made it so you can no longer gain access to the drive. Did you re install windows on the original 40gb hard drive when you switched the machine back to the way it was?

  217. Norita January 6, 2009 3:26 pm #

    Hello, Recently my computer stopped allowing me access to my personal settings. I can only see my files when in Safe Mode. I can open the files but cannot save them. Please tell me if it is possible to slave a hard drive to a Dell XP All-In-One Desktop (no tower; Just the Monitor with built-in hard drive, etc., and a keyboard)? Thank you.

    • Jacqui Best January 7, 2009 3:31 pm #

      Norita,

      It is possible if you get an external USB hard drive chassis, as long as the Dell all in one has usb ports you should be able to put your hard drive in the chassis and plug it in to the computer and use it as you would any other hard drive.

  218. Jena January 9, 2009 3:49 am #

    Hi, I have been able to sucessfully slave a sata drive that had crashed on me to another sata. The new master drive has windows xp on it as does the previous, now slaved drive. I was following a post about going in to the my computer, manage after booting up successfully. I go in click on the disk management under storage, and I only see the master drive, giving me all the specs. Is there something I may have missed in BIOS I need to set? I had discribed the issue I was having with a few tech buddies of mine, they told me I just need to slave it out to another sata and it should be just fine. They said it sounds like there was a boot virus or some kind of physical damage to it and it may have slowly degraded to where it crashed. But they told me that it doesnt take much to get my files and personal items off it once I slave it. Now, if its not showing up in the computer management window, what can i do? I am very desperate to get these files off.

  219. Louis January 9, 2009 8:28 am #

    Jacqui,

    how can I slave an old dell hard drive to a new laptop ??

  220. Roger January 10, 2009 1:55 pm #

    Jacqui, I have followed your steps to slave a hard drive and the results are similar to Chet above, in that the bios sees the slave and also when looking at device mgr I can see the second drive info. However I can’t see a separate drive number/letter in windows explorer. I tried the download demo of dartxp and it only saw the master drive c:

    The master (40GB) is running xp home, the slave (80GB) was running xp pro on another pc until last week when I got a fatal error and now cannot reboot. I’m not much of a tech and want to recover/save about (10GB) of music files, some outlook files and some quicken files if possible before I re-install xppro and wipe out the contents of the drive. I am thankful that I recently made backups of most everything else.

    I am very impressed with the way you and your associates have done the tutorial video and the way you have handled the questions in this long line of responses. I look forward to your questions and or advice.

  221. DTI Data Recovery January 12, 2009 12:08 pm #

    J,

    What type of hard drive is in the IBM? Is it a laptop or desktop computer?

  222. J Paradis January 12, 2009 9:39 am #

    Hi Jacqui,

    I have been on the phone all morning long and given high cost quotes that I cannot afford. I need help to recover data from an IBM computer with Windows Home Edition. I want to slave drive it to a Dell that I believe has Windows XP.

    It is crucial I recover the data on the IBM. How can I do this? And is it possible?

    This is a great site! Thanks for your help.

  223. J Paradis January 12, 2009 9:41 am #

    Also, just so you know I CANNOT get in with Safe Mode.

    The error is system32hal.dll

  224. Ed January 13, 2009 12:50 pm #

    I was having alot of trouble with my computer, got infected with the vundo trojan, tried running programs to get rid of it, and in the end couldnt even boot the computer. I want to slave it to another to retrieve some data (mostly just digital photos). Can it be done without infecting the new machine? Or would it be safer to purchase a hard drive chassis and connect it to a USB port?

  225. Cindi January 13, 2009 2:58 pm #

    My friends hard drive got struck by lightening and his entire system quit working. He would like me to try to recover his photos from the hard drive. His is a Dell Dimesion Desktop as is mine. I took his hard drive out and placed it into my system but my PC did not even recognize it. When I hooked only his hard drive up to my system after removing my hard drive I got a screen that told me the drive needed formatted and that it terminated loading Windows. Both of us were running Windows XP on our systems. Is there a way for me to recover his files? His power was also taken out by the storm and I only have my PC to work with. Thank you.
    Cindi

  226. nicole January 17, 2009 4:29 pm #

    my maxtor “died” yesterday… When I power on it, there’s no signs of running, just silence, seems dead. It was working as normal the day before, when I plug it with my desktop, after some time the computer fails to detect the drive, I thought it’s normal since Maxtor use to power off when the drive not in use.

    Now I can’t seem to get it to work, I’m still under warranty but seagate to do any recovery and I don’t wanna lose my data… I wonder what’s wrong with my HDD, is it something gotta do with the controller board? If some mishaps happen to the controller board, will slaving the HDD to the desktop still work?

  227. nicole January 17, 2009 4:37 pm #

    J Paradis, you can try to use Linux Recovery disc. It work on my laptop, some system file corrupted “c:windowsystem32configsystem” or something. But you’ll need a external HDD, formatted as FAT32.

  228. Tiffany January 18, 2009 12:14 pm #

    My old computer wont turn on any more , Dell says it is either mother board failure or PSU I replaced the PSU and still nothing so I bought yes another dell I would liek to get all the files off the hard drive from the broken one but am not sure how to do it . I took out the hard drive and we have an external drive also is there anyway to connect the old hard drive to the ebook and get the fis off of it with out installing it in to the new computer? thanks so much for your help..

  229. David Mohyla January 19, 2009 1:20 pm #

    Yes, if you have an external hard drive you can open the extenal casing and put your old hard drive in the casing. If you do not want to open your external hard drive casing you can purchase just the external casing for your old hard drive at any Electronics Retail outlet like Best Buy.

  230. David Mohyla January 19, 2009 1:23 pm #

    Nicole, you can try slaving your hard drive. If the sytem BIOS does not detect the drive during the boot cycle the drive is inaccesable. In addition, you can put your hand on the external portion of the drive and try to feel and also listen if the drive is spinning.

    If the drive is not spinning then you will need to have a data recovery company recover the data for you.

    Hope this helps.
    Good luck

  231. Dave January 26, 2009 12:12 am #

    I have installed the hard drive from my pc to my girlfriends as a second drive cause mine quit. It may be the power supply. Anyway, it all works, I just can’t figure out how to access my main folder. I had it set for my password on the other pc on start up. But, the folder says access denied when I try to open it. How do I get full access to my hard dive with the password?

  232. Joseph Whitehead January 27, 2009 3:35 am #

    You mean that you had encryption on, or that it’s simply saying that you don’t have the permissions? The exact error message would be required in order to determine this.

    I think there was an article on this site about changing permissions when having problems copying specific files/folders on an external drive adapter. If it’s the permissions then it’s a much easier fix. You just have to reset them. Getting encrypted files and folders on the other hand takes a little more subtle method, and you must have the password and if I remember right, the registry (large files in C:windowssystem32config) too. It’s too involved to put here but I’m sure that DTI’s people know how. 😉

  233. Joseph Whitehead January 27, 2009 3:53 am #

    Hmm Does it matter if you have the “newer” IDE cables with the extra ground lines? I’ve found that if using ATA-66 or better cables, you usually must use the “Cable Select” setting. I always thought that it made a difference because of some technical reason dealing with signal loss if you set it wrong.

    You can tell the cables are different because the older ones had only 40 wires but the newer ones have 80 wires even though the connectors on the end still only have 40 holes. I’m lazy so all my drives are set to Cable Select and I have the newer cables. Heh, it’s a lot easier changing the jumper only once.

    So is it optional to use the cable select setting on these cables? The ATA specifications aren’t exactly a quick read nor are they even definitive! Then again I’m probably thinking too hard.

    • DTI Data Recovery January 27, 2009 4:56 pm #

      I forwarded this question about cable types to Jacqui for a response

  234. Faathir January 28, 2009 4:04 am #

    i too have the access denied error, the slave hard drive has a password on logon, i cant remove the password because the hard drive auto restarts, i just want to recover my files. is there a way to remove that password and recover my data?

  235. Crystal Edson January 29, 2009 12:19 pm #

    Michael,
    I was wondering if you could give me a solution to my current computer problem. I’m using an HP with Win Xp.
    There was a problem with the town’s power plant and the transformer was basicaly blowing, flames and all. All the power went out and came back on three or four times before I shut off the surge protector. I started the computer back up the next day and it’s been “looping” while it boots. It’ll boot up and ask me if I want to start normally, safe mode, safe mode with comand prompt, ect. But no matter what option I try, it just reboots again. I pressed F8 but those options take me to a blue screen saying “sorry for the inconvience,…if this is the first time you’ve seen this message restart your computer,..if you’ve seen this before chkdisk:/ F” I don’t know, something about the recovery. Then it won’t let me reboot it, so I have to hold the button in to shut it off.
    I don’t have any of the disks that came with the computer, or a floppy drive in the tower, and I didn’t install any new programs or anything.
    All I want off of the computer are my pictures in my Kodak photoshare program and the saved tabs on my internet explorer and mozilla.
    The only solution I came to was to slave the hard drive to a different computer, which I could do, but I don’t want to waste my time and potientionally mess anything up. What are your ideas? I don’t know how to get into a recovery point option, and the F8, F10, and F2 don’t give me that option.
    Thanks so much,
    Crystal

  236. noisedoctor January 30, 2009 10:08 am #

    Howdy folks, a few questions for you. Here’s the background.

    I have XP running on a SATA drive. I also have a fairly old IDE drive that I use to store MP3s, pictures, etc. Yesterday I added a new SATA drive for some extra storage. As I was formatting that new drive, the IDE drive started “acting up.” Windows gave me some sort of error like “Failed to write E:$[some crazy character string]. I tried to open E: (the IDE drive) and it said, :”this drive is not formatted, would you like to format?” Naturally, I said no. I did hear some slight clicking going on, so I immediately shut down my computer.

    I pulled the IDE drive out and rebooted, everything in my system seems fine. So, I threw the IDE drive into an external case (power/fan/USB connection). I got the computer to recognize it and assign it a drive letter (E:). I can open the E: drive and see a directory listing (yippie!). However, if I go into any directory, I get an I/O failure error.

    So (and this may have been the worst thing I could have done, maybe not) I right-clicked on the drive, and used the windows check disk utility and said to Automatically fix file system errors. Well, it’s now almost 12 hours later and it still says “Phase 1” and is sucking 50% of my CPU. At certain points I heard faint clicking sounds but overall it doesn’t sound like the drive is doing much.

    Now, my questions.

    1) Should I let the checkdisk keep running? If not, what would be the safest way to terminate that?

    2) Which (if any) of your utilities would be the best tool for trying to recover as much as I could off the drive? I see mentions of “Speed Clone,” “D.A.R.T.,” and “Recover It All” with trial downloads here… Any one of those? Something else?

    3) It’s probably way too soon to answer this one, but, I’ll ask anyway. I’m never going to trust this drive for anything important ever again. However, assuming I get data off and could then reformat the drive, should I bother? Or just toss it? It probably depends on what we find… right?

    There’s not too much on the drive that I can’t restore from backups (or by re-ripping my CD collection). But, it would save me tons of time if I could get that stuff back off. So, it’s worth $100-ish and not $1,000-ish 😀

    thanks for your help!

    ~nd

  237. John February 1, 2009 8:11 pm #

    My Hard Drive would not load XP , there where various BSOD’s . The most common one that always was shown is “DRIVER IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL ,Stop 0X000000D1”
    Then I was using SAFE MODE and when I did a CHKDSK and restarted my computer I could no longer get into SAFE MODE , this BSOD came up only ONE time “0x00000024” after that when I tried to load up SAFE MODE it would go to this Blue Screen “DRIVER IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL ,Stop 0X000000D1”
    after awhile when I loaded SAFE MODE I would get the next screen that lists all the drivers and would just stay on that screen.

    Then when I tried to load XP “USING THE LAST KNOWN GOOD CONFIGURATION” it would almost get to load fully , but on the regular light blue windows page , just before it fully loads I would get this on the screen at the top “CHECKING FILE ON SYSTEM C: , TYPE OF FILE SYSTEM IS NTFS , CANNOT OPEN VOLUME FOR DIRECT ACCESS” then it would go to the Blue Screen DRIVER IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL ,Stop 0X000000D1″ .

    Now when I called Dell I turned on the computer and pressed F12 , loaded the Dell Resource CD and did a CHKDSK, the result was “ONE OR MORE ERRORS ON THE VOLUME” .

    Going by these blue screens and errors , is it possible that I could recover my Files from this hard drive ?

    I installed a new hard drive with XP . Should I SLAVE the old hard drive ?

    If I slave the old hard drive to the new one , then turn on my computer will the Old Hard Drive show up under My Computer as , say Drive G: . Then I click on Drive G: select the files I need and then Move Selected Files to Drive C: on my new Hard Drive ?

    Or would you have to get some kind of software also ?

    The old hard drive is a Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 9 80 GB ATA/133 HDD .Going buy the instructions above , I would just have to remove the Single Jumper (J50), then it becomes a Slave drive.

    How do you remove the Jumper ?

    My hard drive cable only has one connector to the new hard drive , so I will have to get one that has two , from what was said above.

    The power plug on my new hard drive has another one attached to it , so I guess I can use that one . But it is short and then I could not mount it in the bay above. Could I just rest the old hard drive next to the new one somehow ? I will just have the old one installed until I can recover my files , would this be okay ?

    Is there any risk that what happened to my old hard drive would transfer to the new hard drive somehow ? I will only be recovering Music , Photos , and some personal information . No hardware , software ect…

    Are there other options to recover my data , like is there some kind of USB cable that could hook up to my old hard drive , instead of going into my computer ? If there are could you please post some links , product names . I cannot find anything. If there are ,are these as good of an option as going into the computer ?

    I bought a CMS Data Transfer Box(Model MDT-S12552) from Dell but it is for LapTops.Could that be something I could use (if they have one for a desktop) ?In the instructions it just says you can Transfer data from your computer to the hard drive in the CMS , it does not say anything about transfering data from the CMS to your computer.

    Sorry about all the questions.

    Thanks

  238. John February 2, 2009 5:50 pm #

    Crystal , when you turn on your computer , quickly press F12 , that should take you to a screen where you can load your recovery CD by choosing “load from CDROM”.

    I’am not a computer expert so you might want to wait for other answers on how to exactly perform the recovery.

    • DTI Data Recovery February 2, 2009 6:44 pm #

      Crystal, I did forward your question to a technician, I promise it will get ansered no later than tomorrow. I know that F12 will get you into advanced boot options like John said (thanks BTW) and I had a similar problem on my Dell laptop. It turned out to be the hard drive, which had a bad sector. It is likely that your computer shut down suddenly and the heads impacted on the platter causing the bad sector. If this sector has an operating system file on it, that could be the problem. We do have a fix, I just want to be sure you get the right one!

  239. Dave February 2, 2009 8:00 pm #

    Wow, quite a lot going on there. Well to start you should still be able to recover data from your old hard drive. Lets start with the USB solutions. With USB you won’t have to worry about much other than simpy connecting it to the IDE cable in the enclosure and connecting the power.
    You can find drive enclosures in stock in your local Best Buy etc..
    Here is a link http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8774301&st=usb+drive+enclosure&lp=2&type=product&cp=1&id=1204332553274. You can find them online for about twenty to thirty bucks.

    That said, after you connect your old drive via the USB enclosure you should see the drive apear as a drive letter in Windows lets say E: You should be able to copy and paste your data to your new drive.
    The problems you are having are probably due to some type of corruption in the registry. However, you should run a virus scanner after you transfer your data. AVG is free you can download it from download.com.

    If you can not see your drive after it is been connected via USB then double check everything is really connected. If you still have no joy then try using DART or Recover It All. The demos of the software will show you if the data is recoverable via data recovery software.

  240. Joe Whitehead February 3, 2009 3:29 am #

    I prefer not to put the hard drives on the same cable if at all possible. It’s mainly because it’s (much) slower, and secondly because even in 2009, there’s some drives that just plain won’t work together. Why just ask for more problems? While it’s not likely that a problem on one drive will ‘spread’, it is possible that the long timeouts on the bad part of a drive may tempt a use to shutdown the OS by holding in the power button. Guess what that might do. 😉

    I feel bad about the latest posters who lost their data like that. I fixed a system just recently that had one bad memory module and every time they tried to fix it themselves it just kept making it worse. Eventually, their power supply died as well. They then gave it to someone who asked me to see if I could get it working. They didn’t tell me this but I figured it out by reason and experience. The power supply was some custom size but the pinout and voltages were the same so I could test it (yes I did a lot of research to be sure). The OS wouldn’t even boot to safe mode yet a boot CD kept crashing as well. I found a bad module as I suspected since it obviously overheated(Small form factor with blown fans). I replaced the 2nd DIMM with a good memory module, booted the Dell CD for it, and reformated the hard drive. I burned it in for hours and it just plain worked, tried 3D app, burned DVD, etc. Now it just waits for a power supply that fits.

    The reason I mention this is that if there’s a hardware failure, then rebooting, reinstalling, repair option on Windows CD, and such can totally ruin the file system to the point that it’s much harder to get your stuff back if at all possible. If the hard drive is locking up every time that you even look at a specific folder, then your job is going to be much harder. If you really had valuable data on there, then I’d say get an expert to help. If not, you could just use a USB adapter and copy off what you can. Do NOT move files – just copy. If that means using a disk image tool on this site, then so be it. It’s best to avoid changing the filesystem at all. If you move a file, it changes the directory’s contents to mark the file as deleted – if the drive freezes then your file system is “in an inconsistant state” as the old technical books call it. In english: You can’t always read that folder the next time you restart the drive. 🙁

    The lesson: Always seperate problems. Put the drive in another computer instead of trying to ‘fix it’ by installing the OS again. Test the memory if the drive isn’t the problem. If not the drive/memory/CPU/power/disc reader/etc. then make sure the OS CD is good! That’s why I like boot CDs like the ones mentioned in the other article. USB drive adapters are nice but sometimes I’ve had use a powered hub, or even to give up on the convenience and get a 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch adapter. Watch out for the polarity though – many $5 adapters on eBay have no keys on the connectors to make sure you get it right. I suggest a local store. If there’s no key, take it back – it’s illegal to sell due to fire laws amongst others! Not having that one hole filled in with a key can ruin your drive’s board if you get it backwords=lost $$$ recovering to save $ buying

  241. John February 7, 2009 5:36 pm #

    I recovered my files that I needed , it was very easy. I used a Vantec IDE to USB 2.0 . Only problem was that the Power Adapter did not fit my Hard Drive . So I just used the extra Power Connector that is in my computer .

    I just plugged the USB in and went to My Computer and the old drive was there.Like Joe said above I COPIED the files to My C: Drive . So now if my new HD gets fried I still have the files in my old one.

    Thanks

  242. Crystal Edson February 8, 2009 1:49 am #

    I don’t have any of the recovery CDs.

    • Jacqui Best February 10, 2009 1:29 pm #

      Crystal,
      You can contact your computer’s manufacturer and they will usually send out another copy for a nominal fee.

  243. Van Guy February 8, 2009 6:08 pm #

    Hello,
    My Dell 8400 Dimension won’t boot- system restore doesn’t help. Upon further inspection, I see that my hd designation is not C/, but is now I/ !!! My wife & 11 yr. old were on it while I was ouy of town, but no one knows what happened. Ihad been planning to wipe the hd, as it’s 4 yrs. old and pretty sluggish. But I would like to recover some important documents before doing the deed- slaving looks like the way to go, but do I need recovery softwae for this type of problem? Any advice for this learn-on-the-fly (albeit tenacious) newbie?

    • Jacqui Best February 10, 2009 1:29 pm #

      Van,

      It is likely that other devices hooked to the computer are taking the coveted “C” position. I would first recommend slaving the disk to another machine before attempting the “system recovery” process with Dell as this will leave you with no access to the data when it is finished. It is likely you will not need recovery software once the drive is slaved and will just be able to move the data off.

      If you can not access the drive once it is slaved, you will more then likely need some kind of recovery software, whether it is DART XP or Recover It All, depends on if it was formatted NTFS or FAT32. After the data is removed that is critical I would then use the Dell CD’s that came with the computer for the format reload. Note: you should disconnect any USB devices when you are attempting this, you NEVER want your Windows load to be on any drive letter but C, Windows itself makes many calls to that drive assignment as well as many pieces of software.

  244. John February 10, 2009 4:08 pm #

    Van , you should call Dell . I bought my Dimension 2400 in 2004 and they still help with phone support , I was suprised ,I’d figure I would be on my own. 1-800-624-9896

    If they cannot walk you through it over the phone , they can connect to your computer and fix it while you watch them.

    • Jacqui Best February 10, 2009 4:37 pm #

      John and Van,

      It is true they will help getting it booting again, but I would not allow them to do anything that will be destructive to the data, which has been known to happen.

      If they recommend their Dell diagnostic and to do the system restore, tell them no until you get your data off!

  245. Van Guy February 10, 2009 7:21 pm #

    Dear Jacqui,
    Thanx for the clear, concise and timely reply…even this short bus ridin’ scooter trash understood it !
    Van

    • Jacqui Best February 11, 2009 10:40 am #

      Van,
      ROFL I am glad I could help, if you need anything else just let me know.

  246. mintedcow February 12, 2009 10:24 pm #

    I’m trying to slave a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 Sata150 HDD. I don’t see a slave setting. I tried the Maxtor website and couldn’t find anything. How do I set this drive to a slave?

    • Jacqui Best February 13, 2009 11:42 am #

      Mintedcow,

      Generally SATA does not “slave” you just have to hook it to the appropriate SATA port on the mother board. They will be Designated as SATA0 SATA1 SATA2 where 0 is the first in the chain and then continues on. More then likely the boot drive is hooked to SATA0. I hope this helps.

  247. Ronnie Downing February 14, 2009 7:10 pm #

    FWIW, the “Cable Select” jumper setting worked for me when putting my Windows 98 hard drive into my XP machine. When I set the jumper to “Slave”, the machine booted using the 98 drive. I may have misunderstand the prescribed jumper setting. Anyhow, I’m a happy camper. Thanks, Jacqui! God Bless You!

  248. Robbie February 17, 2009 3:25 pm #

    I’d like to to get files off of two hard drives that are no longer connected to computers. I would obviously slave one hard drive at a time, but one is from a laptop that ran XP home, and the other is from a desktop that ran Windows 98 first edition. Will I have any trouble connecting these to a PC running XP Pro, or any other operating system for that matter? Thanks!

    -Robbie

    • Jacqui Best March 4, 2009 11:25 am #

      Robbie,

      You should be able to read them fine with XP pro. You would have problems trying to read the XP HOME drive on Win ME or Win 98 if it is formatted NTFS, since they can not read that files system.

  249. Richard February 18, 2009 12:06 pm #

    Hello and thanks for the info. on your site. I was trying to do a Hard Drive Recovery by putting the hard drive that I lost the info on to another pc hard drive. My first attempt I had them backwards as far as the ribbon cable went. The pc started and I could go into device manager and see both HD’s and I did a file search for my quickbooks and many files came up. Then I noticed from the video I had my connections backwards ( I think ) so I switched the connections. Now upon rebooting system I get a Boot Failure: Syetem Halted_
    Did I have it right the first time?
    If so: How do I get those files back on?
    Thanks

  250. LeeBee February 23, 2009 9:50 am #

    I have a fairly new HP with Raid 1. I will be sending the drives to you for recovery.
    I have an older computer that I can use in the mean time via backup / restore. My question is, If I am to buy a new computer, what do you recommend as the best (most reliable and easiest to recover / repair) hardware / software configuration?
    I will probably be running Vista Business 32 bit. OS.

  251. Anonymous February 24, 2009 9:42 pm #

    My problem begins at step #8. I have a broken Gateway PC with a functioning seagate Barracuda 7200.7 200 GBytes hard drive. I’m trying to slave it into Dell Dimension 8200.

    I can’t find anything that comes to looking like the pins you describe on the seagate hard rive. I’ve scanned the entire drive with a magnifying glass – & NADA. Also, can you please give me the big picture of what we’re trying to do here? Are we trying to replace the Dell hard drive? Or, are we trying to attach the seagate to work in auxialiary to the dell hard drive?

    • Jacqui Best March 4, 2009 11:08 am #

      Ron(Anonymous)

      This is a sata drive there fore it is not a master slave situation. You will need to connect the cable to a SATA port on the mother board of the machine you are trying to connect it to.

  252. Ron Kurimsky February 24, 2009 9:47 pm #

    I have a kaput Gateway PV with a functioning seagate hard drive. In trying to get the data off of the seagate – I’m trying to slave it to a Dell Dimension 8200. My problems begin @ step #8. I got the drive out of the Gateway. But, I’ve scanned the drive with a magnifying glass and I can;t find anything (the pins) that comes close to what you described in step #8. Any ideas?

    • Jacqui Best March 4, 2009 11:06 am #

      Ron,

      Do the cables look the same as my walk thru? What is the exact model of the drive, and I will find out for you if there is jumpers and where they are.

  253. Ron Kurimsky February 24, 2009 9:49 pm #

    OOPS – previous question – I meant STEP #9

  254. rian February 26, 2009 3:43 pm #

    I have a few computers that have gone bad (2 laptops and two desktops). By going bad, they stopped booting up or the screen no longer works on the laptop. I would like to save the data (pictures etc) off the computers. How can I connect them to a working computer (laptops and/or desktop) to saave trhe data? I thought maybe I could set them up as a slave or by an external try for the laptop hard drives? Is that possible or how should I handle it?

    • Jacqui Best March 4, 2009 11:02 am #

      Rian,

      The best thing to do would be to get an external chassis for all of them, there are ones that come with multi adapters so you can use them with many different types of hard drives.

  255. Hetal February 28, 2009 7:36 pm #

    First of all Thanks for the detailed explaination. it is so much useful for person like me who don’t anything about computer. Still I have few questions. Plesae reply me asap. Thank you in advance.

    I have crashed hard drive. Hard drive is from Maxtor. I was not able to log in to the window for some reason. And tried to do something from pressing F12 and go to the set up and what not. I don;t know what I made a change that after that attempt, the the error message started appaering like this………”an erroe occure to read disk. CTRL+ALT+DEL to reboot.” Something like this kind a message started. Then I talk to the Dell Co. and they suggested me to replace hard drive. Then i did. Now I want to recover the data from my old hard drive. And I found your procedure on the internet. I was so happy that now I can do it without any help from Dell. Because my Dell warranty/guarantee expired. But, now I have more questions. Please help me regarding this issue.

    Question#1 – In your procedure number 9 to make drive a slave. Per your explaination I have checked the jumpers’ location. And I found it on the second position already!! Jumper was not on the first set of pins nest to hard drive which make the drive as master one. And I found it on the second set of pins already that way it make hard drive as a slave drive!! So I left it the jumper where it is. Now the question is the jumper is not on the first pins next to hadr drive is the correct?

    Question#2 – Per the procedure number 12. I check the cable which connects the hard drive to the board. And I found on my PC it has only one hard drive connector. As per picture in the step # 12 I do not have a two sets of pin. So I tghought a little and I saw that my PC has a cable for the two CD drive has two connectors. So I took one out from one CD drive and connected slave hard drive. Then I started on the computer. Now I can see a NEW drive called D: drive in the explorer window. BUT I can not access this slave hard drive. When I tried to go in to this hard drive, it ask me to choose weather I want to format it or not.. Now my question is is my procedure correct? if not then I have to buy the cable with the two connector on it.

    Please help me on this. I will be very greatful to you.

  256. Persys March 2, 2009 3:56 am #

    Dear Jacqui,

    I really hope you can help me. My husbands laptop broke down and he found this guy to help him fix it. The guy took the hard drive and placed it in an enclosure and has a USB connection cable.

    I need a quickbooks file from that drive, but when I try to retreive the file thru my desktop using quickbooks, quickbooks is telling me that I don’t have permission to access this folder in a multi user….something or other….

    I know I can just contact the guy that help before, but he is a very creepy character that I just don’t like dealing with. He is very arrogant and the way he explains things I just have a hardtime understanding him because he uses a lot of computer lingo that I just don’t understand. He also give me the creeps the way he looks at me and I don’t know any one else or have the money to pay someone else to help. My husband does not understand that i just don’t want to deal with this man I want to see if I can fis this before he forces me to call him.

    I did go to properties and tried to make it a sharable drive, but something is just not right.

    The laptop used windows xp and my desktop uses vista.

    Please help. I need this informaiton to file our taxes.

    Any help will be greatly appreciated.

    Thank you

    Persys

    • Jacqui Best March 3, 2009 7:01 pm #

      Persys,

      No worries.. the first thing you should know is that Intuit ( the company that makes Quick Books) Is AWESOME. They really give great support. I am going to give it a waggle to try and expedite helping you out but if I a wrong I would try them for sure. Have you tried copying it to the current machines hard drive? It could be that it thinks you are trying to “share” a comany file which it isnt going to let you do unless you pay for some sorta upgrade. Please let me know if it works!

  257. Debbie March 3, 2009 4:05 pm #

    First, thank you very much for providing this forum. I am amazed at what I’ve learned in the past half hour, that no one told me in the past week I’ve been trying to fix my computer! My question is, I’ve made my old drive that wouldn’t boot, a slave as directed above. I can see it in the bios, as a slave, my computer boots on the new drive, no problem, but when I go to disk management, it doesn’t show up with a drive letter. Below that area I see Disk 0, which is my new drive, looks fine, and then Disk 1, but it says it’s unallocated. I’ve changed the jumpers to just about every other configuration, but it doesn’t change it. Anything else I can try?

    Thanks so much,
    Debbie

    • Jacqui Best March 3, 2009 6:56 pm #

      Debbie,

      When you say it would not boot what was the error you were getting?

  258. Debbie March 4, 2009 8:36 am #

    Jacqui,

    I was working away and the computer blinked a few times, then rebooted. When it came back up and tried to load I got this:

    PXE-E61 Media Test Failure, check cable
    PXE-M0F Exiting Intel Boot agent

    I shut it down, opened it up and checked all the cables, closed it up and tried to boot, but couldn’t get anything else. I could get to setup, but that was it. I took the computer to a local repair office and they couldn’t get it to boot either, not even in a different machine so assumed a bad drive and ran a recovery process on it using RStudio. They didn’t copy anything to the old drive, but put it all on the new drive. That allows me to get up and running again, and I have all my documents backed up so no worriers there, but none of my emails, address book or bookmarks got backed up as I thought, (old program, no loinger supported, have now switched to a new one) and none were recovered, which is a huge problem. A friend suggested it might not be that the drive was completely gone, especially since all my other data was recoverable, but just the master boot record? The shop here gave up, so I was trying to see what I could do on my own, then looking for who I might want to send it to for another recovery attempt when I found you guys.

    Thanks,
    Debbie

    • Jacqui Best March 4, 2009 11:11 am #

      Debbie,

      If you have the ability too hook this drive up to a machine either by slaving it or by putting it in an external usb hard drive chassis I could come in remotely and take a look at the drive and let you know what I think. Youre friend is right it could be something simple wrong with filesystem especially since all of your data was recoverable.

  259. Uttam Chowdhury March 8, 2009 1:30 am #

    I needed to format my C drive unfortunately D and E drives were deleted and many important documents were lost. I installed Windows SP and Office 2007. Could you tell me please whether I may be able to recover data/documents from the lost D & E Drives.

  260. Bill Hampton March 8, 2009 10:04 am #

    I have installed my 98SE hard drive in my XP computer as a slave, followed through the above directions. My computer will not recognize that it is installed. What do I do now? Someone said I needed to go into the bios and change a setting. I know nothing about bios or what settings would need changed. Shall I take the machine to an expert?

  261. Chris March 9, 2009 1:03 am #

    I need help. I’m new at this so I’m probably missing something. My old comp crashed on me a while back. I was unable to slave my hd to my new computer because the old is ide, and the new is sata. Also, the plugins for the power supply are completely different. I had an old hd laying around, so I reformatted it running Window’s XP Pro SP3. After reformatting it, it runs perfectly fine. I then tried slaving my hd from the comp that crashed to the newly formatted hd. I had my newly formatted hd set to master, and the crashed hd set to slave. When I try to start the computer it does various things, and it’s everything I don’t want. First time it booted up and then froze, and now it tries (I’m assuming) to boot off of the slaved hd. I say that because after trying for several minutes to boot up I get the same error message that I did after it crashed. I can unplug the slaved hardrive, change the jumper pin on the newly formatted hd back to the cs, and the reboot and it will run fine. I could careless about restoring the old hd, I just need to recover about 3 years worth of digital pic files off of it. Thanks for any help.

  262. Debbie March 10, 2009 1:11 pm #

    Hi Jacqui,

    Yes, I have the drive set up as a slave now, but it doesn’t have a drive letter in disk management, will you still be able to see it?

    Debbie

  263. Felicia March 10, 2009 6:47 pm #

    Hi,

    Thanks for the great info. My PC crashed for the second time, so I’m returning it to the manufacturer. Before I send it back, I hope to recover some (hope all) of my pictures, documents, etc… and was told that the only way to do this is to “slave the hard drive.” I know very little about computers, except how to use one, and was wondering if this the same process I would use to recover my information?

    Thanks for your time and help. It is greatly appreciated.

    Many thanks, Felicia

  264. lyz March 15, 2009 8:31 pm #

    I have an old Maxtor HDD model 9087U2 and on the label that is sticked onto the hard drive it says: Master/single: On Slave: Off Jumper:J50
    I want to install this hdd onto a Dell Dimension 2350 with the original 30GB hdd on it. Now I haven’t opened up the computer and taken a look at the hdd but I was wondering if I even need to?

    The maxtor 1 says slave off, does that mean that there’s no chance of putting it onto dimension 2350

  265. Gary Marsh March 17, 2009 8:21 pm #

    Hi.

    I own an HP laptop which has recently been infected witha nasty virus. I own ESET NOD32 antivrus software, but the virus managed to get past it. Their support team told me to download a bunch of antivirus/spyware and malware software to help rid the virus, but the virus is disabling those programs. The only other option they told me was to slave my hard drive to another computer and run those same programs.

    Do I risk infecting the other computer with the same virus by doing this. Do I aslo risk corrupting the non-virus computer, as I have no idea how to perform this:)

    Any comments or help would be greatly appreciated.

    Thank you!

  266. Andy March 19, 2009 2:16 pm #

    Jacqui I watched your tutorial on how to slave a hard drive it was great!! I did follow it but when I started the computer, it looks like the system is reconizing the drive but it can not give it a location. Also on this drive a have windows 98 and on new drive I have window XP is any comflict to this. Thanks for the help

  267. Joseph Whitehead March 20, 2009 2:51 am #

    There is an alternative to connecting the drive to another computer. Use a boot CD that allows you to copy files over the network. Hmm a future article?

    • DTI Data Recovery April 1, 2009 10:47 am #

      Joseph, we actually do have an article that shows how to use BART PE:
      Using Bootable CD to Run Data Recovery

  268. Andy March 23, 2009 12:02 pm #

    Thanks

  269. Andrew Lazo March 24, 2009 4:05 pm #

    Hi, i saw your vid on how to make a HD a slave and i had a few questions of my own. First of all, my external hard drive recently died on me (power supply that is, HDD is fine). How do i slave this? On my HDD it says that Master/Slave jumper not requires for SATA (serial ATA hard drive) does this mean i dont have to do anything with the jumpers? please get back to me asap. ty!

  270. richard ward March 25, 2009 11:09 pm #

    after my external hard drive became unaccesible, I followed your instructions..thanks.
    I have a request-hope you can help.Googling doesn’t come up with this answer.
    I have GHost 2003, windows XP. I have tried to backup an image onto a NEW functioning external drive P, but the problem seems to be the selection/drivers etc to make the USB connection work. ( I am picking USB1.1, and one time ” have ghost name the drive letter–next time I unchecked..but that isn’t my question)

    Can I avoid the USB issue by backing up C: drive to a SECOND internal HD,P: creating F:Newname.gho image . ….. then copy/paste ie DRAG the Newname.gho from F: to the external HD :P?
    using the USB connect to drag the file as a regular file.?
    Then when I do a restore…I simply direct the ghost.exe to P: Newname.gho .
    will this work?
    IF you MUST reply by email..ok..but i will check here also.
    Thanks

  271. richard ward March 25, 2009 11:12 pm #

    oops…addendum…to prevoius
    I meant ” Can I avoid the USB issue by backing up C: drive to a SECOND internal HD,F:….. then move from F to P drive

  272. David Mohyla March 27, 2009 2:11 pm #

    You should be able to do this without a problem. The GHost image file is just a file.

  273. Jim March 27, 2009 2:10 pm #

    I need help recovering pictures from an old hard drive. Its a WD drive and the computer recently crapped out. The hard drive uses the old gray ribbon data cable and the new computer I am going to be hooking it up to currently uses the new SATA cables, I think thats what their called. I tried installing the old style cable into the new desktop with the old harddrive on slave. But the system tried to boot up with the old hard drive to no avail. I was hopin there is a way to basically boot up the new computer, and have the old hard drive as just a secondary storage, so I can copy all of my old photos to my new hard drive. Been married four years and most of our pictures are on the old hard drive, that’s really all i need from my old hard drive. Thanks a lot for helping out. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

  274. Ryan Mathis March 30, 2009 10:28 am #

    Ok i have a second harddrive that i need to mount, and i am using windows xp crystal, i have everything connected correctly, however the system will not locate the second drive there is one place it will pick up but i cannot do anything major.

  275. Rachelle Robles April 1, 2009 8:20 pm #

    I tried doing this when my external hard drive died. But I smelled like something was burning so I removed the slave drive. Am I doing something wrong? I really want to recover my files from the external hard drive. Please help. Thanks.

  276. Scott April 8, 2009 7:28 am #

    I have a compaq 7478 running windows 98. I would like to take the information off so that I may upload my pictures etc. into my newer com. using XP. Problem the CD ROM drive is down so writing on cd is not happening. The USB ports are not recognizing the drivers so I can’t use them. What do I do? I would like the simplist and inexpensive route please. Any help would be appreciated.

    Thank you

  277. Justin April 13, 2009 9:46 pm #

    Hello,
    I have followed all the steps. I have an external enclosure drive that I have put my old hard drive into and hooked up to the new laptop with the same os. The old drive had the bsod and would not boot. When I plug in the external enclosure with the old hard drive the same blue screen comes up and shuts down the new computer with the same error codes. Can you help me? I don’t even have the time to see if the new computer is picking up the external enclosure, bc it shuts down.

    Thanks ….Justin

  278. Nicole April 16, 2009 2:08 pm #

    I’ve gotten the hard drive out – great instructions, but I’m stuck. I see the pins, but no indication/wording of ‘slave’ – actually just the word TYCO imprinted on a plastic guard over the pins. It is a Seagate hardrive. How do I make this one a slave drive to continue on with the procedures to recover data? Please advise. I can provide any p/n’s if needed. Thanks in advance!

  279. Brett April 18, 2009 3:16 pm #

    I’m trying to retrieve data from a Western Digital Hard drive running Windows 98. The drive is working fine but I can’t seem to get anohter PC to recognize it, even when using an external case. My current attempt is to add it as a slave to a PC already running Windows 98. This PC’s master drive is a very similar Western Digital 40GB drive. I belive I’ve set the master / slave jumpers correctly on both drives and they are both recognized in the BIOS during boot up. But once Windows is runnning, I can’t see the slave drive in My Computer. I can see it in Device Manager, where it says it is it is functioning properly but does not have a drive letter assigned to it. Any thoughts?

  280. Joe Whitehead April 21, 2009 5:55 am #

    What OS did you use to format it with in the first place? One of the tools on this site should show the partition type. It should be FAT for Windows 98. Windows XP can use the NTFS type as well. Of course Windows 98 doesn’t recognize the NTFS partition. I think that your problem is related to either the partition type, or some kind of ‘overlay’ program.

    In XP if you have a machine running it:
    1) Right click on “My Computer” and select the ‘Manage’ option.
    2) Click on ‘Storage’ and then the disk manager.
    3) There should be a list of all drives. Look for the one that’s the right size and then it should say if any of the partitions are NTFS.
    GL!

  281. Persys April 24, 2009 9:10 pm #

    Jacqui,

    You help me out with a problem about two months ago and your information really helped. I just wanted to thank you sooo very much for your wisdom and willingness to help a stranger in need.

    Thanks again and God Bless.

    Persys

  282. Kylie April 29, 2009 7:04 am #

    Hi,

    I can’t get my PC to boot up at all. The fan runs but there is nothing on the screen. I can hear just two beeps. Is it beneficial for me to take the hard drive out and set it up as a slave on my other PC?

    Kind Regards

    Kylie

  283. Mercy April 29, 2009 10:32 am #

    How do we slave a hard drive when it is sata

  284. jamesy May 7, 2009 2:54 pm #

    hey, my laptop broke and i was hoping to use an ide adapter to put it in my computer.. would i need to mount it inside it.. and also if i use it as a slave.. could i play games off it that are already installed or would they have to be on the master?
    thanks very much 🙂

    • Jacqui Best May 8, 2009 12:20 pm #

      Jamesy,
      You can slave it but you will more then likely need an adapter to go from standard IDE to a Laptop drive. You can also get yourself a USB external chassis and that should allow you access to the drive. You will not be able to play anything installed under that operation system because of of the DLL’s and Registry entries are on that boot os which you can not gain access to on another booting os.

  285. Jack May 7, 2009 4:21 pm #

    I am running Windows 2000 Professional

    I don’t know what I am doing and disabled some services.
    Now computer will not allow me to restart them.
    Won’t allow me to move data.
    I think the ones I disabled were:
    windows installer
    Remote Proceedure Auto Connect manager
    (something else)

    Is there a way I can get these enabled again? I can’t access them from Properties or right clicking them anymore.

    If you can’t help me, I will have to start over…..

    I already tried the Windows 2000 disk and Repair program and that did not fix it at all, same problem. Starting over would not be THAT bad, except I can’t paste my data, I can right click and copy, but it won’t allow me to paste so I can’t transfer data to a removeable USB drive.

    Any help would be greatly appreciated.
    Thanks,
    jack

  286. Tom May 8, 2009 1:48 am #

    I have a question. I have a laptop that has been acting up and sometimes will not even start up and the monitor will get green dots all over it. So I think its going to die and have to get a new laptop but thank god the prices have come down a lot. I would like to get the data off this one and I even have some old hard drives I would like to get things off of how can I do that with a laptop?

    Also I have an external hard drive and I got it when I was using XP and it was fine. Now that the computer is using Vista, and when the computer with the vista would not start I fired up the old laptop with XP on it. Well I went into the external hard drive and it would not let me get anything off it why is this. Hope your can help me thanks.

    • Jacqui Best May 8, 2009 12:22 pm #

      Tom,
      Is the vista machine seeing the drive at all?

  287. Haydee May 8, 2009 5:18 am #

    how will i slave the sata and the ide?

    • Jacqui Best May 8, 2009 12:23 pm #

      Haydee,

      I dont understand, so you want to slave a sata drive on an IDE port?

  288. Joe Whitehead May 8, 2009 9:20 pm #

    Kylie: 2 Beeps is generally not a good sign for the rest of your system, but is usually not a problem for hard drives. Depending on the BIOS programmer, 2 Beeps can have different meanings, but if it makes them without the hard drive in the system, then obviously it’s the board/RAM/Video/etc. that is being uncooperative. Often, I’ve heard beeps, reconnected the (loose) RAMs and OH WOW IT WORKED! It’s usually nice when that happens. 🙂

    If it only happens with the hard drive in your system, I’d suspect the drive or cables or chipset on the motherboard. The cable is an easy check so I usually do it first. If it works fine in another system, the drive and cable are probably fine. If the problem happens only with that board, and with any hard drive and cable, then you almost certainly need a new motherboard. 🙁

    Another gotcha on some motherboards: If the CMOS battery (CR2032 – a get almost anywhere ‘coin cell’) is worn out, then it won’t even power up all the way!

    Mercy: SATA is like PATA (‘old’ IDE/ATA) but you must have a SATA connector on your motherboard/addon card/USB adapter. Actually, SATA is a LOT easier since there are no jumpers to get wrong. You can pretty much use any SATA adapter if you can get power to the drive. There are PATA -> SATA power adapters or your power supply might already have it (usually a black power connector with red/yellow/black wires going inside).

    Jamesy: Some games will work but you might have to reinstall them on the new hard drive and just copy the saves over. The majority won’t work right without the registry entries from the old OS’s software hive for them.

    Jack:
    Try this: Load a command prompt and then use this command where C: and E: are replaced with the drive letters of your boot(system) and flash drives:
    xcopy /S C: E:

    Better: Get Kubuntu LiveCD and learn how to use the ‘Dolphin’ file explorer on it. Search in Google for this and how to use the file explorer. As an added bonus, it can check if your RAM is any good. Bad RAM=damaged data when copying and saving files!

    RPC (Remote Preceedure Call) is a vital service that despite it’s name, is used for almost all local programs! There’s no easy way to restore something like that. Reinstalling is unfortunately likely to be done. There’s a way that _I_ could get the services back, but it’s not 100% and requires knowing how to access the registry hives on another copy of MS Windows/Linux LiveCD/etc. If I remember right, you can’t even add/remove services without RPC. Sigh… Annoying to fix. I would just use this as an excuse to get a cheap 2nd hard drive and put Windows 2K Professional on it and copy all my files off the older drive which I would put in a drawer/box somewhere inside the new drive’s antistatic bag. Say, inside the
    new drive’s box. 😉 If you don’t want to buy a new drive and get a full backup of your files as a bonus, then just use the repair option on your boot CD (assuming 2K has it, since XP is slightly newer). When you say repair, do you mean “system restore” or do you mean a repair installation on top? If reinstalling isn’t working, try renaming the old folders in the root drive using another PC, and then install into a fresh set of folders. While it allows you to install to a different folder name than “Windows”, this isn’t always a good idea. Some broken programs assume the same folder name as the default.

    Tom: Ouch, the green dots=heat-related issues. The capacitors on the board are about shot thus the RAM chips are not powered smoothly enough. A sure-fire 2nd sign of this is that it won’t always start. You need a new laptop motherboard or better yet system. One is

    cheaper if you know how, but I can’t recommend laptop repairs to the uninitiated… Sigh. ;(
    OK, if the hard drive won’t even show up under a boot CD or another machine anymroe than you need to put it in the antistatic bag As-Soon-As-Possible and call DTI. You’re likely in total need of hired experts who will be able to take your drive apart and fix it good enough to get data off of it. Unfortunately, heat tends to also kill hard drives and power supplies. This is why I clean my vents of dust bunny ‘infections’ every so often. Some models need it once a year – mine needs it every season due to bad vent location/design. Again, you need to be a technician to even think of taking laptops apart. 🙁

    People wanting to hook SATA drives up to a PATA computer: Get a PATA-SATA adapter (there are many that work both ways but be careful to read description well), get an USB-SATA adapter, or get an addon card. The PATA-SATA adapter is very handy but the addon card is more practical as it gives you many more ports.

  289. Anonymous May 8, 2009 10:10 pm #

    thank you

  290. prashanth May 15, 2009 10:10 am #

    hi people is there anyone who can help me out to solve this problem………

    the problem is, i hav only LINUX OS in my s/m and i don’t hav any partitons or any other OS….
    i wanted to shift to windows OS ……….but i am not able to uninstall linux and install windows …..Tht is i am nt able to remove my boot loader(GRUB)…so please tell me hw to remove my boot loader…….

  291. george May 19, 2009 10:56 am #

    I accidently deleted the partition on my slave drive, I have downloaded the partition repair utility, but cannot find the infirmation it asks for as thers is none of this information on the case. The hard drive is a Maxtor diamondmax plus 9 model with 80gb drive space ata/133 // Lba 1600 8652a . Is it possible that you may have this information, or know a man who has?

  292. Peggy Wells May 21, 2009 8:37 am #

    Once I remove the hard drive, how do I copy it to an external hard drive?

  293. Joe May 21, 2009 8:04 am #

    Hi there,

    I was wondering what my best bet would be in recovering my hard drive info from my old pc that my son used. One day it just would not come on, i only get a yellow light on the power button, where it would normally be green and then start up.

    My question is, if i slave the hard drive, and then install it on my computer, would it recognize it automatically? Is it that simple?

    Thanks,
    Joe

  294. Joe May 21, 2009 9:39 am #

    Hi there,

    I was wondering what my best bet would be in recovering my hard drive info from my old pc that my son used. One day it just would not come on, i only get a yellow light on the power button, where it would normally be green and then start up.

    My question is, if i slave the hard drive, and then install it on my computer, would it recognize it automatically? Is it that simple? Any ino would be greatly appreciated.

    Thanks,
    Joe

    • Jacqui Best May 29, 2009 12:16 pm #

      Joe,
      It is very likely it will come right up, there is only way to know for sure though. I would give it a try and if it doesn’t see the hard drive then give me a call I will be glad to help!

  295. rolando May 21, 2009 4:44 pm #

    I have slaved my hard drive in another computer and was able to save files but I’m not able to get into my account because i set a password on it. What can i do or how can i get to my files?

    • Jacqui Best May 29, 2009 12:13 pm #

      Rolando,

      There is a way to do it if it is just a case of you not having enough permission to access the directory.. the error you would get would be “access denied” if that is the case you need to take control of the folder. You can type that into Google and get Microsoft walkthru on how to do it.

  296. Brian May 22, 2009 6:25 pm #

    I have a Maxtor One Touch iii (750 gig), external drive. When I turn it on, the light comes on for about half a second, then nothing. It won’t get up to speed. It’s not the power supply because I have a second one. The tech guy at Maxtor said it might be possible to run it as a slave drive after opening it up. Will your instructions, above, work for this?

    • Jacqui Best May 29, 2009 12:04 pm #

      Brian,

      Yes they should, I would look on youtube for a video on how to open the chassis because they can be difficult to open with all the snaps and such. After opening it up should be exactly the same as the walk thru. You can also just buy yourself a new chassis to put the drive in .

  297. Joe Whitehead May 23, 2009 6:04 pm #

    prashanth:
    If you want to get rid of EVERYTHING (including all files and settings stored on the hard drive), then just get the Ultimate Boot CD (DOS version) and use the “Boot ‘n’ Nuke” program to do a zero fill. Once you do this, the OS must be entirely reinstalled as if you got a new drive from the disk manufacturer.

    If you want to save any of it, then there IS a way to keep the old partition, assuming you have any space left on the drive to make a 2nd one. Just boot the Microsoft Windows installation CD and tell it to ‘create a new partition’ and it will just replace the boot loader with it’s own. Paradoxically, this is the very ‘feature’ that annoys people doing dual-boot setups. 😉

    george:
    To restore a partition, I’d usually use a tool like GetDataBack or Norton Systemworks (back in the DOS days) but there’s some utilities at this site that would also work. I’ll have to go looking at the one they have here – I think you downloaded the partition table editor and not the one that _finds_ the location of partitions. That information you need is specific to the old partition’s location (starting sector), type (FAT16/32 or NTFS or…), and layout (size). The model of the drive makes no difference – all drives big enough now would be able to hold the same partitions. Older drives often had a different number for the ’63 sectors’ used in newer (LBA) drives. This is no longer an issue, so many partition finders assume it as a hard coded value.

    If I find a tool to search a drive for missing partitions, I’ll post a link here. Some ‘undelete partition’ tools are free. Good luck!

  298. Anoop May 27, 2009 12:21 am #

    I have a wd SATA 160GB HDD and SEAGATE IDE 80GB HDD and A Sony DVD drive IDE .How should I assign all these three to get them working properly?
    Please Help………….

    • Jacqui Best May 29, 2009 12:00 pm #

      Anoop,

      I need to know which drive you want to be the boot drive and which for data. after I have that information I can tell you how to set up the machine!

  299. Steve May 28, 2009 3:03 pm #

    I have to save data from an old ide hardrive. the new machine is all sata,, can i still conect ide drive as a slave.??? should i find an adapter or use slot in mother board for ide drive.?? both systems are xp home edition.. dual core..
    thanks Steve

    • Jacqui Best May 29, 2009 11:58 am #

      Steve,

      You can still slave it, the catch is you will more then likely have to use the CD rom channel it is slower but should allow you to get your data off the drive. The other option is to buy a USB hard drive chassis and hook it up externally to the new machine.

  300. mike May 28, 2009 7:34 pm #

    i have a desktop where the power supply has died so i cant boot it up, i am going to take the drive out and slave it to my newer dk. the old one is xp and the new one is vista. there is nothing wrong with the drive, so i would like to just leave it in the new desktop. can i use it normally after slaving it or is it just for data recovery?
    also on my laptop, i formatted the hard drive, but now it has partitioned my drive into two 20 gig sections, with the second partition holding the old data before fromatting. i did not ask it to do this while formatting, and would like to get rid of the partition as it is using signifcant storage up. can i get rid of the partition without reformatting again
    thanx for any help.

    • Jacqui Best May 29, 2009 11:57 am #

      Mike,
      The slave drive can be just for data if you like it is not only just a data recovery option slaving a hard drive. What you have to be careful about is making sure the lave is on the 2nd channel (slave plug) on the cable other wise the newer machine will try to boot from the slave, since it have been the boot drive on a previous machine.

      If you want to make it one big drive there is really no way to SAFELY do this, you would need to move all relevant data to somewhere other then this drive, delete all the partitions and then make a big one. After that format that drive and move the data back to it. There are 3rd party pieces of software that allow for partition size adjustments but a lot of times they cause major issues and data loss.

  301. Steve May 29, 2009 2:53 pm #

    Hi Jacqui
    When you say use the cd rom chanel, do you meen hook it up as a removeable starage devive.? inline with exhisting dvd burner, then as a slave.? I did intend to leave it in the comp as a second storage drive once i had removed my old files from it, but if an external drive case is the answer, so be it.

    • Jacqui Best June 3, 2009 5:22 pm #

      Steve,

      I just mean to use the cable that is internally hooked to your cdrom drive. it should have a second connector on it, but the connector on the mother board is known to be slower then lets say and straight IDE HD connector. That being said it will still be faster then USB.

  302. Brian May 29, 2009 5:26 pm #

    Thanks, Jacqui! But I still have a problem. I put the Maxtor One Touch (Barracuda 7200.10; 750 gig) in a desktop as the drive on the end of the cable, with the existing desktop drive in the middle of the cable, and gave both drives power. (When I took it out of its case, the Maxtor did not have a jumper on it to make it a master drive; it seems it was already set up to be a slave drive [i.e., no jumper across the end pins.)

    The result was that as long as the Maxtor was hooked into the desktop, the computer would not boot. It did nothing. When I took it off the cable, it booted using the existing laptop drive.

    By the way, I checked the power going into the Maxtor in the old external drive casing. It was getting 25v off the yellow wire and 12v off the red wire– the same as the power cable in the desktop. So I guess power is not the issue.

    Is there any hope?

    *******HERE’S THE ORIGINAL QUESTION AND YOUR ANSWER:
    BRIAN: I have a Maxtor One Touch iii (750 gig), external drive. When I turn it on, the light comes on for about half a second, then nothing. It won’t get up to speed. It’s not the power supply because I have a second one. The tech guy at Maxtor said it might be possible to run it as a slave drive after opening it up. Will your instructions, above, work for this?

    JACQUI: Yes they should, I would look on youtube for a video on how to open the chassis because they can be difficult to open with all the snaps and such. After opening it up should be exactly the same as the walk thru. You can also just buy yourself a new chassis to put the drive in.

    • Jacqui Best June 3, 2009 5:18 pm #

      Brian,

      I am curious is it spinning at all when it is plugged into your machine?

  303. Steve May 30, 2009 4:45 am #

    well i got impatient, went out and bought a hardrive case, installed the old hd,, pluged it all in,,,now i’m still stuck.. the new machine reads the old drive as a local disk,, only option it gives me is to formatt the old drive….. no good , i need to save the old files.. why is it so..Jacqui…help me.. 🙂 please..

  304. Levi May 31, 2009 1:56 pm #

    Please excuse my ignorance, but what is the ‘jumper’ that you’re referring to?

    • Jacqui Best June 3, 2009 4:46 pm #

      Levi,
      IDE drives have a bank of little pins with a piece of plastic covering 2 of them usually on the back of the drive. The bank of pins is the jumpers I refer to.

  305. mike May 31, 2009 5:15 pm #

    ok, i hooked up the slave drive, but the connectors on the master are different, so i took the second connector on the wide ribbon that connects to the cd rom drive and hooked the slave into that and the extra power connector from the master into the slave. the settings for the jumpers are correct as far as i can tell. now when i boot up, the slave is booting first. in my computer, both drives are showing. i cannot hook into the ribbon from the master due to the fact that it is only a small red ribbon a partial of th size needed and doesnt have an extra port anyhow. also, when i booted up, the windows xp oplatform is saying it needs to be reactivated due to hardware differenced detected. ths is an original copy and not pirated. i am running vista on the master.

  306. mike June 1, 2009 3:03 pm #

    ok, i went into bios and saw that both drives are shown , so i changed the settings for the sata drive to boot up first, and my original drive now boots up. however no i cant find the slave drive anywhere but in bios. before i could see both in “my computer” but only the master now. what am i doing wrong?

  307. catherine June 2, 2009 4:30 am #

    I had a WD 160 for two years and did not have a problem. I bought a new computer and plugged it in. It said it installed the software and then, I got the message that the driver is ready for use. When I went on My Computer, I didnt’ find it. I went to Device Management, and it recognized WD. I went’ online on WD website and, based on the symptoms, they are suggesting files are corrupted. I can’t hook it up to any other computer either. I have the same problem.

    The website recommended reformatting, but I need to recover data from the hard drive. Any suggestions?

    Thanks. I would appreciate it.

    Catherine

    • Jacqui Best June 3, 2009 4:41 pm #

      Catherine,
      I would recommend running the Recover It All Professional demo.. it should allow you to see your file. If you see your file I would just purchase the software and move the data off, if you do not see your files then I would give me a call and we can try some other things.

  308. Brian June 4, 2009 12:37 am #

    No, it’s not spinning at all, Jacqui. Thanks for any input!

    PREVIOUS COMMENTS:
    Thanks, Jacqui! But I still have a problem. I put the Maxtor One Touch (Barracuda 7200.10; 750 gig) in a desktop as the drive on the end of the cable, with the existing desktop drive in the middle of the cable, and gave both drives power. (When I took it out of its case, the Maxtor did not have a jumper on it to make it a master drive; it seems it was already set up to be a slave drive [i.e., no jumper across the end pins.)

    The result was that as long as the Maxtor was hooked into the desktop, the computer would not boot. It did nothing. When I took it off the cable, it booted using the existing laptop drive.

    By the way, I checked the power going into the Maxtor in the old external drive casing. It was getting 25v off the yellow wire and 12v off the red wire– the same as the power cable in the desktop. So I guess power is not the issue.

    Is there any hope?

    *******HERE’S THE ORIGINAL QUESTION AND YOUR ANSWER:
    BRIAN: I have a Maxtor One Touch iii (750 gig), external drive. When I turn it on, the light comes on for about half a second, then nothing. It won’t get up to speed. It’s not the power supply because I have a second one. The tech guy at Maxtor said it might be possible to run it as a slave drive after opening it up. Will your instructions, above, work for this?

    JACQUI: Yes they should, I would look on youtube for a video on how to open the chassis because they can be difficult to open with all the snaps and such. After opening it up should be exactly the same as the walk thru. You can also just buy yourself a new chassis to put the drive in.

  309. ryan June 4, 2009 1:32 am #

    i do not know how to slave my hard drive…

  310. mike June 4, 2009 7:55 pm #

    you answered everyone but me :(( any sugestions? thanx

  311. Joe Whitehead June 5, 2009 6:59 pm #

    Eww, 12 volts and 25 volts? You’re sure you don’t mean 5 and 12? I had a power supply once that sent 25 volts down the 12-volt line. I lost two drives due to the motors and boards burning out. 🙁

  312. Bill Hampton June 6, 2009 9:23 pm #

    Jacqui:
    I have installed my harddrive from my Windows 98SE machine, by you tutorial which worked great, into my Windows XP machine. Now I can not get the XP machine to recognize this drive, it acts as though nothing is installed. Any suggestions on what to do to get the machine to recognize this drive. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

  313. jane June 9, 2009 3:55 am #

    Hi

    My D drive cant open. Once I click on d drive, It said u the file is not formatted u want to formatt? All my file store in D drive. Can recovery d drive? Can I get back my file from d drive?

    Thanks

  314. ikenna oluigbo June 17, 2009 6:41 am #

    thanks so much for this. the pictures and video really helped me. i can now slave and make recoveries

  315. Marc June 18, 2009 3:14 am #

    Thank’s a lot! I appreciate what you are doing in order to help us in our computer familiarizaition. Thank you! Again.

  316. Zareh June 18, 2009 9:58 am #

    I am trying to slave an old WD Expert HD on to a new dell only to transfer the data to the primary HD on the new dell. I know The jumper setting is set to master only because i took it out of another desktop but no where on the HD shows the configuration to set as a slave. how do i know which setting is right to set as slave?

    thanks
    Z

    • Jacqui Best June 24, 2009 11:03 am #

      Zareh,

      Generally you can find the hard drive jumper settings on the Manufacturer’s website

  317. Zareh June 24, 2009 3:36 pm #

    Jacqui,

    Thank you so much for responding. You are right, I finally found some info on this in WD website. It took some doing however as this is a very old unit and WD C/S couldn’t even find it himself. These units usually have the jumper settings right on the label but this one didn’t cuz the unit is too old. The info I found seem to have worked anyway.
    Thanks
    Z

  318. Lauri June 24, 2009 7:15 pm #

    Okay my comouter kept restarting and when I went to just reinstall windows xp without deleting or fmatting my drive since I have info on it I would hate to lose. I have been trying to hook up as a drive slave but.. my drive has 2 wires that are flat and will not hook up to the older computer we have. so the pictures above well don’t quite fit into my computer. Any ideas?
    thanks Lauri

  319. mark June 29, 2009 2:35 am #

    tnx a lot

  320. Matt June 29, 2009 3:53 pm #

    This was very helpful. I’m sixteen and just built my first computer with a lot of help from my brother. Most sites offer paragraphs with plenty of computer lingo. This video helps so much. Thank you very much.

  321. NTH June 30, 2009 4:21 am #

    I have seen a lot of good info posted here so I am hoping you can help.

    I have a Dell dimension desktop 8200 w/Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80 GB HD ST380021A (cable select enabled) running windows XP Home edition. Last week, windows would not boot normally, instead it was looping/cycling the screen that gives you options to start in safe mode, sf md w/ntwking, last known good config, etc. I managed to “grab” a blue screen message which tells me I have a problem (no kidding). However, it does have “technical information” which means nothing to me, but may be interpretable by someone else:

    **** STOP: 0x00000024 (0x00190203, 0x827D8208, 0xC0000102, 0x00000000)

    To try to access/recover my data files, I took out the HD and I loaded XP from the re-install CD onto an old WD caviar (2 GB – circa 1996) just to get the machine booting – that seemed to work. But when I added the Seagate HD as a slave, machine would NOT Boot. So, I removed Seagate (XP now boots as expected) and used an IDE to USB adaptor cable instead. The OS recognizes USBport/drive is connected (w/message hi-speed device connected to non high speed hub), but I can’t see the drive (my computer) to access it as with other storage – so can’t get my files.

    What should I try? Do these seem hardware or software related?

  322. wayne tullberg July 15, 2009 12:43 pm #

    i have 3 computers. 1 of them died, my main computer!!!! i want to install the harddrive into my other computer and use it as a slave. i went online and found the necessary information on installing it exept for that my computer does not recognize the fact that the second hard drive was even installed. when i go into my computer it only shows my c drive. i want to go into the d drive but it does not show up on my screen. i searched my computer for it but it wont find it for me. i took out the jumper for the second hard drive and set my original harddrive as the master because i read that cable select needs no jumpers in the slave drive. is this all correct? i do not know what i need to do next? i do not know how to reconfigure anything if thats what i need to do, which is what i think i need to do?

  323. Aaaron July 16, 2009 12:30 am #

    I have a computer with a WinXP OS and NTFS file sys that I want to add an old WD Caviar 3.5 hard drive as an external drive. I have the enclosure and I’ve put the drive in and plugged it up. The external drive is being recognized in my computer as the G drive (I also have another external hard drive), but when I right click to manage the drives (my computer) the drive letter does not appear. When I right click on the drive letter and click format nothing happens. When I click the properties of the drive, it says the file sys is RAW.

    Before the processor crashed in the old computer the drive was working.

    What do I need to do to access the data on the disk and then to use the disk as extra storage? Thanks

  324. Vasapasefika July 16, 2009 3:43 pm #

    Hi that was a great article…..but i have a question please…Can i make a hard drive of another model a slave using another model machine say for example i want to connect a compaq hard drive as a slave on a dell pc…

  325. james pilgram July 18, 2009 10:34 pm #

    can you help me with a problem that i’m having with my compaq(desktop) when i try to power it up it say’s Disk Boot Failure insert system disk and press enter

  326. Vincent July 19, 2009 4:57 pm #

    This tutorial is brilliant! I can’t wait to enslave my own hard drive now (especially since it won’t boot). However it is a samsung hm080ji and apparently they don’t come with jumpers and I can’t find information on the internet on how to set them to slave. Can you help me please? I would be very happy!

  327. Robyne July 20, 2009 1:41 am #

    Hi, great stuff here…. and very encouraging. It is with hopes you can help. I have a laptop; pavillion hp zd7000 with XP (not sure maybe PRO) came up with an error code at first. Then it just shut down before i could write the error code down. The laptop is a wide screen and gets really hot.. so this may have contributed.. dont know. Anyway now its telling me, “Disk Read Error Occurred”… I read somewhere to take out the battery on the back side… so i did that.. and now its saying Operating windows cannot be found and it flashes.. Actually it alternates sometimes it will say “Disk Read Error Occurred” or other times will say the Operating Windows cannot be found. I am not close to home where i store all my windows, utilities or restore CD’s. I really don’t want to format. Its with hopes I can save my material on the drive.

    Im not sure what to do. I too was wondering could I use an external hard drive for the slave??? Or does it have to be another laptop? Can it be a desktop? Do I need to store windows XP on it first.. ugh!!! I hope you can help guide me through this as I have no clue… Thanks a bunch!!

  328. linda July 23, 2009 5:27 am #

    hi why wont my pc come on i have a dell dimension e521 using vista ,press on button but all it does is flash amber

  329. Tyrone Bouldin July 27, 2009 9:41 pm #

    I followed the pictured instructions exactly. Now my computer will power up, but it won’t boot up. The computer fans will come on but my monitor won’t come on or nothing……….What’s up with that? Did I blow out something? I sure hope not…….

  330. Ralph Id July 28, 2009 5:49 am #

    ooooooooooo what a nice article even with the photos they all helped me to know what i have been sufring for.
    one more thing,
    Q…..what if one was using DELL and he want to copy the recovery filles on IBM is that possible?

  331. marcia August 13, 2009 5:20 pm #

    Hi Jacqui,

    I need help to recover data from an hp computer with Windows xp Home Edition. I want to slave drive it to a Dell that has Windows XP.

    It is crucial I recover the data on the hp. How can I do this? And is it possible? i want to make sure i do not loose any documents or pictures from my problematic computer.

    This is a great site! Thanks for your help.

    Also, just so you know I CANNOT get in with Safe Mode.

    The error is missing ntoskrnl.exe

    thanks
    Marcia

  332. Matt August 19, 2009 8:45 pm #

    So id like to say this is fairly easy. My 13 year old brother and i did this together as our brothers night. We had our fair share of difficulties, but found the answers in pluggin the power source into the hard drive the primary. We also ran into some trouble with the floppy, but just bypassed that. After that it started up, and went from a 4gb, to a whoppin 33.7gb. We reformated the drive and its good to save. Thank you so much for this forum and the video. Also thank you so much for showing where that little slave prong goes, most all the otehr sites ive seen fail to show a good view of that one tiny peace.

    Matt and Zach

  333. Agentclicker August 30, 2009 11:43 am #

    hi.i would like to thank people like you who are willing to give help.this is very helpful. i still have a problem though. what if the master hard disk & the slave hard disk have different pins?i’m trying to slave an old hard disk (IDE, 29 pins right?) in a newer hard disk (SATA). would be most glad for your help.

  334. Lynn September 1, 2009 8:27 pm #

    I have a Gateway 702GE with a WD2500 harddrive. I need to take files from my old Windows 95 machine. I took the harddrives (2) out of the 95 machine, but
    see no IDE cable in my Gateway except from the DVD drive. I only have a power
    plug and another one.

    Also, on one of the harddrives that I am trying to recover pictures from may be
    so old that it does not have a jumper place for slaving it. IT is a Maxtor 72004RP.
    Is it too old??

  335. Darren Baker September 5, 2009 10:50 am #

    I have a windows x p desk top compaq computer given of my support worker but it does not seem to be running fast enough for my likens what can I do to make it run faster than it should do and also it will not accept my printer or my B T Home Hub wireless broadband network it has not even got Microsoft word 2000 on it so please call me and help me out on 07897590982

  336. DEBRA GAIL MARSHALL September 9, 2009 10:25 am #

    computer is a waste and i need info that is on the hard drive. i took it completely out and was wondering if there is a way or adapter to download the info to my new computer? both are windows xp. also what does one do with crashed computers?

  337. DEBRA GAIL MARSHALL September 9, 2009 10:33 am #

    office 2007 is also in that hard drive and it can be loaded once on a desk top computer and once on a lap top. will this be downloaded from the hard drive?
    this is my third comment

    • DTI Data Recovery September 9, 2009 10:44 am #

      Debra,

      What type of computer crashed? What type os the new computer? What we really need to know are simple things, laptops, desktops, etc. Do you know what type of hard drive it is, SATA, IDE, laptop, etc. Also it would help to know what type of hard drives are in your new computer. You will need your install disks to re-install Office, but you will be able to move all your documents and spreadsheets.

  338. Dennis September 14, 2009 10:46 am #

    Great info on slaving the hard drive…I do have a problem though, I can see my primary drive and slave drive in BIOS but the computer won’t boot up. I t goes to the Windows screen then after that just a blank screen.

    Can anyone help?

    • Jacqui Best September 22, 2009 11:53 am #

      Dennis,

      I am curios have you tried unplugging the slave and then tried booting?

  339. audrey Lewis September 21, 2009 4:54 pm #

    I viewed your video of changing jumper from master to slave. My maxtor model # 34098f4 was last used as a master. I want to retrieve the files off it onto my new comuter. The maxtor pens are not labeled.The master jumper (J50) is in the left most position, the next two sets of jumper pens are empty, next is a single pen and then one more set of double pens. I can not copy the files to my new computer until I know witch set of pens will make the slave connection.

    Thamks

    • Jacqui Best September 22, 2009 11:02 am #

      Audrey,
      That must be a Maxtor serial number not a model number.. the model number will be WDxxxx. If I can get the model number then I will be able to tell you what jumpers to change.

  340. tommy September 23, 2009 11:14 am #

    ok i got 3 different computers a dell a hp and a emachine last week i did a system recovery on my hp that had my 500 gb seagate external hard drive and it erased everything off my external and reformated it to hp which was crazy anyway i was wonderting if i could make one of the emachines hard drives and slave it into the hp and do a system recovery and it whipe everything off so i can use it?second if i can do that will it make a partition on it like my hp has where i can do a system recovery using f10 (i think it is) or will i have to have an acually cd the emachines has a 200 gb hd and the hp only has a 40 jus wanted to get rid of it cause i got the 500 gb to well thanks in advance and also jus wonderin if i could reformate to the hp if needed would i be able to put it back into a emachine and it jus pull up as hp instead of emachine and would i still have the partition (f10) for system recovery

  341. Darren Baker October 6, 2009 10:47 am #

    were do i find the memory on a windows xp desktop computer

  342. george October 9, 2009 5:35 am #

    I accidently deleted the partition on my slave drive, I would like to reinstate the partition without losing the information on the drive, can you help ?

  343. Beccy October 11, 2009 7:58 am #

    Can I slave my hard drive on a satellite p20? As I only have this computer can I slave the hard drive and put it back into the laptop to recover data?

  344. Donald Nusberger October 13, 2009 5:47 pm #

    I have a seagate barracuda 200 gig hard drive that I recently installed on my comp and the bios reads it but the my comp window doesn’t, y is this?

  345. jesse October 14, 2009 11:15 am #

    id like transfer files from main drive to the slave and can i use inf from slave to run
    my computer?

  346. temm October 16, 2009 4:29 am #

    My machine stopped browsing recently.I tried to scan it to see if it is act of virus but all to no result.please help me on what to do next because if this machine is connected to the network it always freeze the network .i need your assistance now.

  347. Tyrone Bouldin October 16, 2009 5:23 pm #

    My computer crashed on my xp desk top. How can I slave that hard drive to my vista lap top.

  348. Joe LG October 17, 2009 7:44 pm #

    I have a primary and secondary hard drive. I made each a slave drive on my computer to recover some data. However, the data is in a password protected folder in Documents and Settings.

    If I have a password protected folder on a slave drive, how do I bypass the password to recover the data?

  349. David October 18, 2009 5:42 pm #

    Thanks for this guide, it helped me try to slave my external HD, which I dropped the other day while it was running. (!!)

    Unfortunately, the BIOS does not seem to see the HD, which makes musical beeping error noises when it gets power…Is this beeping noise a sign that my drive is pretty much dead for good?

  350. irish October 27, 2009 8:16 am #

    I have tried to slave my hard drive and I still can’t access the info on it. I’ve jumpered the pins correctly, I can see drive in the bios, but it doesn’t show up in My Computer. I’ve gone to administrative tools – computer management – storage – Disk Management and it shows two drives. The first is the C drive with 18.65gb FAT32 and the other doesn’t have a drive letter nor does it show a file system. So I then downloaded the D.A.R.T program to see if it would help me retrieve the info on the hard drive. I ran the program and got no joy so I then ran the deep scan and got the same results. Can someone shed some light?

  351. irish October 27, 2009 10:03 am #

    I did fail to mention one thing. When I first powered the unit up it worked fine. The drive was shown in My Computer. I looked at the drive and files in the drive then backed out like I normally do and shut the system down. The next day when I went to pull the files off is when I discovered I had a problem. Does this help?

  352. Dan November 1, 2009 6:33 pm #

    Ok, my old PC died on me and I got a new one, looking to transfer my old data on HD to my new one. Both are Dell XPS’s. I followed the video and did what it said, however the cables are different, they are not the long flat ones. Also with the old Drive in, it does not show up under the Computer section. Just my main drive and the DVD drive. How do I get it to show up?

  353. Peter November 1, 2009 11:05 pm #

    I followed the instructions to make a maxtor the slave by removing the first pin jumper (closed to the HD cable) There is also a jumper from the second top pin to the third top pin.
    Help Now what do I do

  354. Peter November 1, 2009 11:05 pm #

    please see previous comment

  355. d.d.d.dorris November 14, 2009 8:07 pm #

    I have a Western Digital external hard drive that is not working. I just moved and it was working just fine when I packed it. After setting up my workstation at new location, plugged the drive in and nothing. I restarted my computer and was prompted to allow the disk to “be checked for consistency” which I did….but still nothing. When I go to “My Computer” it is assigned a letter, but when i mouse over it no information is displayed. When I double click on it i am prompted to format the disk (which i am afraid to do). Any suggestions?

  356. asif malik November 17, 2009 2:33 pm #

    but how can i make my SATA harddisk as slave plz tell about it because in sata i didnt saw the jumpers???

    • John Best November 20, 2009 10:30 am #

      SATA drives do not use jumpers. The BIOS determines Primary Master / Slave and Secondary Master / Slave by the order they are plugged into the SATA ports. Some BIOS’s will allow you to change the order.

  357. EClark November 19, 2009 9:17 pm #

    I have a Maxtor external hard drive as the slave in my commputer but I can not get the data off it. BIOS sees it Data manager sees it but it’s not listed on My Computer. I do not want to format the drive because it has stuff on it.

    • Jacqui Best November 24, 2009 1:26 pm #

      EClark,

      If Disk Management is seeing the dive then the likely culprit is a Master Boot Record problem. I would recommend a piece of data recovery software like DART or RECOVER IT ALL.

  358. carina November 21, 2009 10:03 pm #

    Hello

    I just wanted to confirm something, do I need to slave a sata hard drive or will it be detected automatically when i just plug it in? I’m just getting confused as the pictures above are for IDE ? Because my hard drives do not use the thick cable-ling.

    • Jacqui Best November 24, 2009 1:20 pm #

      Carina
      SATA should have ports on the Motherboard and based on the SATA port number that is what place it will take in the boot order (unless you go in the bios and tell it different)

  359. JW November 23, 2009 2:13 pm #

    I have an old HP computer that died on me after 9 years. I bought a new HP computer. I believe that the old computers HD is not the problem and is still good. I would now like to transfer the data from my old HD to my new computer’s HD (not necessarily place my old HD into my new computer).

    How do I do this, and what do I need (cables, software) to achieve it?

    Thanks

    • Jacqui Best November 24, 2009 1:19 pm #

      JW,

      The best course of action would be to go to your local electronics retailer and buy a USB enclosure/Chassis then you can pull the old hard drive out of your computer and put it in the enclosure and just hook it up via USB to the new computer.

  360. carina November 25, 2009 3:40 am #

    thank you for replying !

    but just one more question. If i plugged in sata hdd on a different computer, will it be recognised without it being reformatted / partitioned? eg, i’m trying to retrieve files from hdd of old computer.

    Thanks !

    • Jacqui Best November 25, 2009 3:00 pm #

      Carina

      Yes it should see it try right clicking on MY COMPUTER and going to manage. You should see DISK MANAGEMENT, click there and in the bottom pane on the right hand side you should be able to see the PHYSICAL drive. If Windows sees the drive then most data recovery software should see the drive also since they are working with the physical media not the logical media (PARTITION)

  361. Coll November 25, 2009 12:01 pm #

    I pulled a hard drive out of my sub-compact Sony Vaio and installed it into a Rocketfish 2.5 kit. The Sony system was XP Pro. I plugged into my Toshiba (running Vista) and I see all the files I want but they will not open. A window comes up asking for permission. I’m lost. What’s that best way to deal with this. I’m trying to recover photos and Word docs. Thanks.

    • Jacqui Best November 25, 2009 2:58 pm #

      Coll,

      You need to take control of the folder under your CURRENT user profile. You can try typing into google “Take Control Of Folder Windows Vista”. They other option would be to run data recovery software against the drive like DART or Recover it All both work under the software layer so they will strip the permissions off as you copy the files over to the Vista machine.

  362. Coll November 25, 2009 11:33 pm #

    Problem solved. I plugged my Rocketfish with the installed 2.5 hard drive from my old Sony Vaio into another (old) saved Sony desktop PC running XP as well and it took off! I was able to download all my media and files into my Linksys Media Hub 1T with another 1T MIRROR for safe keeping. That was my last PC backup that I needed. I now have all my docs saved dating back to 1995.

  363. danny November 29, 2009 10:58 pm #

    my problem seems simular to JWs problem. My internal video card went out on my E Machine “Windows XP” causing the monitor not to come on with the tower. My hard drives are good. I bought a HP with Windows 7 and the wiring harness and connections that goes from hard drive to mother board are different. Do i get the same thing to transfer files from old hard drives to new one? I have pretty important files on the old hard drives and i need them for work .

    • Jacqui Best November 30, 2009 12:08 pm #

      Danny,

      Yes I would recommend getting a USB enclosure/chassis this will allow you to hook up and Hard drive you want. Make sure it is multi platform compatible (allows for SATA IDE and the like)

  364. Dominic November 30, 2009 7:48 pm #

    I have a 1 GB hard drive which is partitioned into three:Drive C (454 GB); Drive D-recovery (11 GB); andDrive F (465 GB). Drive D is a few MG from being full and I am getting warning messages that Drive C is nearly full and I may loose data unless I free up space. I thought the data would automatically transfer over to Drive F when Drive C became full. What do I have to do to switch over to Drive F as my primary drive. I don’t want to loose any of the data (music) I”ve stored on Drive C. I’m a senior and not computer knowledgeable at all. Thanks

  365. Dominic November 30, 2009 7:51 pm #

    I forgot to mention that I”m using Windows 7 as my operating system. Thanks

  366. Dominic November 30, 2009 8:06 pm #

    Another correction, my computer has a 1 TB hard drive which is partitioned as stated in my previous email. thanks

    • Jacqui Best December 1, 2009 10:08 am #

      Dominic

      You do not want to make your F drive your primary.. you would have to reformat and reload for that to happen.. I would recommend just MOVING the data type files over to your F drive (jpg,mp3,docs) and that should free up the space.

  367. Candy December 1, 2009 1:52 pm #

    I’m trying to “slave” a hard drive into my computer and have followed the instructions above. The computer is recognizing the drive but it wants me to format it which is not what I need or want to do. This drive came out of another computer and has virus/spyware problems and won’t let me install any programs on it. In speaking to a computer person, I was advised that I could slave the drive into my computer and run virus/spyware software on it and get it cleaned so it can be used.

    What have I done incorrectly that it is recognizing the drive but wants to format it?

    Thank you!

    • Jacqui Best December 2, 2009 2:38 pm #

      Candy,

      I dont think you have done anything wrong it is more then likely something the virus did to the drive. Asking to be formatted usually means a boot sector problem. I can fix this remotely if you would like or you can try recovery software to move the data off the drive and then try reformatting.

  368. Tink December 1, 2009 10:12 pm #

    I’m trying to recover data from the hard drive on my laptop.

    When I try to start Windows it gives me a blue screen with an error of unmountable boot volume. the error codes given are as follows.

    0x000000ED
    0x86AC92E8
    0x00000000

    I purchased a hard drive docking station and tried to view/retrieve the information from the hard drive. When I go into MyComputer it often stops responding. The furthest I’ve gotten if that I can right click on the K drive where my hard drive is and it gives me the option to “open” among other things. After a few minutes it gave me a “popup” telling me that I needed to re-format the drive.

    • Jacqui Best December 2, 2009 2:36 pm #

      Tink,
      My guess would be either the docking station is bad or the hard drive has bad sectors. The first is a very easy fix .. just get a new docking station and test to see if you get faster reaction from the computer. The second should be sent to us to allow us to get the data off.

  369. Tink December 1, 2009 10:29 pm #

    I was looking over the above posts and went into manage and “Disk Management” what I found was the drive I’m trying to retrieve information on shows that it has 224GB of 224GB free. I know this is not good but there must be some way to get the information back no?

  370. Candy December 2, 2009 2:50 pm #

    This hard drive is the same exact hard drive as the one in my own computer
    (the good one!). Can I use my recovery disks to “re-do” the corrupt hard
    drive and then put it back in it’s own computer? We don’t care about any
    data that is on the corrupt drive but would just like the computer to work.

    • Jacqui Best December 3, 2009 1:25 pm #

      Candy,

      Those recovery disks are generally for a computer TYPE not for the hard drive. They also will contain none of the actually Windows files they only allow you to access the “recovery partition” of the drive and then extract an image that resides on the hard drive. If the 2 computers are identical then is should in theory work.. but if not then it will not..

  371. danny December 2, 2009 7:21 pm #

    Jacqui,Thanks for replying,..i looked on best buy and i think i found what im looking for based off of your info.” Thermaltake – SATA Hard Drive Docking Station with eSATA and USB Connection” i think ill try this ,this weekend to see if it works. Thanks again.

    • Jacqui Best December 3, 2009 1:21 pm #

      Danny

      I will keep my fingers crossed for you and as always if you need me give me a call!

  372. Candy December 3, 2009 3:38 pm #

    Jacqui,

    Yeah I was in Best Buy yesterday and actually was speaking to one of the “geek squad” and they told me that it probably would not work – too bad, can’t use the easy way out. Have to find somebody with a Windows XP program and then I can reformat and reload Windows.

    Thanks for your help anyhow. I appreciate the quick answers!!!

    Candy

  373. HZ December 3, 2009 6:59 pm #

    Got the hard drive from a defective pc installed to a USB enclosure, and plugged into a working one. it works — I can see some folders/files there, but those folders on the desktop are missing — under document/settings, I can only see icons of the short-cuts. tried on windows XP, vista, and 7, no difference. is the enclosure a ‘plug-n-play’? have I missed some steps? Thanks!

  374. tejasimha December 4, 2009 2:10 am #

    i have IDE hard disk suddenly it not reconizing after safe removing from pc.I tried in my friends pc there also its not recognizing .cable and usb port is good. i am using usb type portable hard disk. Help me out from these

  375. geri cass December 4, 2009 9:45 am #

    Hi I followed instructions for slaving hdd and recovery, as soon as I connected cables and switched on check disk started and is still going is this good or not.Thanks for all information find it most helpful, I think!!!

  376. geri cass December 4, 2009 10:48 am #

    can i put recovered hdd back in other computer now, and hope it works

  377. DAKER December 13, 2009 9:17 am #

    I GOT DELL COMPUTER, AND LOST , EVERYTHING IN THIS CPU, THIS PC, HAVE INSIDE, 3 HARD DRIVE, HOW I CAN CONNECT THIS 3 HD, BY THE JUMPERS, I HOPE SOMEBODY CAN HELP ME, THANK YOU.

  378. David December 14, 2009 5:25 am #

    I formate a hdd and installed xp sp2 on a dell p4 and later returned the hard disk to its original processor which was a del p3.
    on boot of the p3 it always displayed the dos screen displayed when f8 is pressed during booting and choose to start windows normaly, when i press enter only the progress bar is displayed to completion and the p3 reboots.
    this problem keeps on repeating even if i choose to start in safe mode the p3 hungs after a certain file is loaded and reboots.

    please help?

  379. asif malik December 15, 2009 11:09 am #

    once i used low level formatting software to formate and removing bad sectors from my sata hard disk then i used window 98 for creating partition but when i command fdisk it does not run and the cd display that no fixed disk present plz tell me how can i create partitions plzzzzzzzzzzzz

  380. Carroll Bradshaw December 15, 2009 6:49 pm #

    I have a computer that was running windows xp and it will not boot up. I really need to try to save the data on the hard drive. I purchased an enclosure and plugged the hard drive into another computer running vista via usb. The computer chimes and says the hardware is installed but i cannot see it. I followed the instructions above but and I can see the drive but it tells me that it is unallocated and when I right click it does not give me an option to import.

    Any ideas would be appreciated

    • Jacqui Best December 18, 2009 11:55 am #

      Carroll,

      More then likely it is an issue with the MBR (partition table) I can not be sure if it is jjust an issue where the setting need to be put back in or if if the drive has developed a physical problem in that area. The best thing to do would be to give me a call and let me Remote in to take a look at the drive real quick, it takes about 15 minutes and costs you nothing but I will more then likely be able to get a good idea of what went wrong and how to fix it.

  381. Michael P December 18, 2009 5:11 pm #

    I am trying to recover data from my old computer hard drive (manuf: 11/22/2000)which was running Windows ME. Hard drive is a Maxtor N256, Model # 5T060H6. there is no diagram on the hard drive but has the following info; jumper (J50), master/single (on), Slave (off). The jumper is on the 2nd set of vertical pins right of the Hard drive cable. Seagate Tech told me to move jumper one vetically to the left ( next to HDcable) to make it a slave. He didn’t sound too convincing and that info. contradicts the article above for Maxtor [When you want to make a drive a slave you must make sure there is no jumper on the first set of pins next to the hard drive cable. ] Any info. would help. I think the serial # on the HD is SG-0044 WT-19661-OBM-A389. Thanks

    • DTI Data Recovery December 29, 2009 4:51 pm #

      If you plug it into the second IDE slot, maybe unplug CD drive and it will auto slave.

  382. travis December 22, 2009 2:31 am #

    i need help ok i have a old computer maybe 4 or 5 years old. the c drive does not old a lot. i got a new c drive but now the plugins dont match. my c drive is telling me it is full. some one told me it would be better to keep my files out of the c drive and put them in my d/cd or e/dvd/cd drive. but it did not work my c drive is still telling me it is full. i looked through my c drive and files from my e or d drive is now were to be found on it. i been trying to figer this out for a will. if you can plezz help. and my computer is telling me i do not have a slave drive

  383. Jarvis December 24, 2009 2:23 pm #

    thanks for ALL the information!!!
    I have done everything as above, I see my folder (which is now the “d” drive) when i open documents and settings it opens all my user names. the one i use has a password on it and when i click it i ONLY get access is denied. can i get around this.

  384. jesse December 30, 2009 1:37 am #

    hi there i have a maxtor i have it slave but i can’t format i telling me the windows can format and i don’t no why can u help me please thx bye have a happy new yrs

  385. Lou January 10, 2010 3:58 am #

    Hi Jacqui:

    Though this post is nearly three years old, you helped me immensely, as I was able to save our important (yet non-backed-up???) files, on what I thought was a completely dead drive. Wish that I knew that it was this easy several months ago when our HD failed (originally thought it was the motherboard).

    Worst case, thought I would have to bribe one my work’s IT guys to ghost it on the DL. Thanks again!

  386. Doug Huey January 11, 2010 2:15 pm #

    Is it feasible to slave a hard drive to expand memory? I inherited an 2 old Gateway towers and am using one for home use but it is slow and constantly running low on RAM…Thanks…

    DH

  387. Ripudaman January 15, 2010 5:51 pm #

    Hi I have a SATA 2.5 inch hard drive (Hitachi part #: HTS541616J9SA00) in my laptop, it crashed.

    Further research shows that this has no slave/ master switch. Can you please advise how do I make this HD slave?

  388. Bruce Cliffe January 21, 2010 2:12 pm #

    I have a hard drive that is running spin right and seems to be going no where. Is it possible to connect it to my laptop and and see if I can download the data off of it that I want.

    Please advise as how I would be able to accomplish that.

    Thanks

  389. Gordon Chamberlain January 26, 2010 7:29 pm #

    Hello, I have a hard drive with sata connection and 2 hard drives with ide, will I need to buy 2 different enclosure/chassis ( one with each type connections) for my 2 different type hard drives? I want to take data off each hard drive ( photos) to save on one . Thank you! Gordon

  390. Richard January 28, 2010 11:27 pm #

    I want to make a “bit-by-bit” copy clone hard drive and cannot find the software or format called MTL that is part of a data recovery software that my tech says will permit him to recover the data while I proceed with the use of my own drive. He says I cannot use Ghost and I cannot do it over USB. It has to be an internally attached blank hard drive that I make the bit by bit clone onto. I see various file by file, sector by sector, byte by byte but not bit by bit. Where would I get this needed MTL and what does it stand for anyway?

  391. ARF February 3, 2010 6:15 pm #

    I have a malfunctioning western digital SATA hard drive that appeared to be Windows related, i was getting an error message along the lines of “missing or corrupt file windows system32 config system.” I attempted to retrieve the data using a hard drive enclosure but was not successful and did not attempt to set the drive as a slave/secondary. I took the hard drive to a data recovery company that diagnosed the problem as being file system damage but nevertheless could recover all the data, as you can imagine this option is very costly. Therefore my question becomes if i attempt setting the hard drive to a slave/secondary drive what is the likelihood i will be able to recovery my data without having to resort to recovery software and if i attempt this would i compromise the integrity of the data?

    Thanks in advance

    ARF

  392. edwin February 11, 2010 3:07 pm #

    problem-old hp pavilion dv7-with xp-home=but i always maintained it well it was running great.
    i stepped out of the house, a certain family member online. phone call your computer sounds like a car..what do i do …I say shut it down and unplug…they pull plug…i get home and now computer will not boot, system error please restart cntrl+alt+delete.
    still no boot. other computer with xp-pro= should i take hard drive slave it and reformat?

  393. Ankur February 12, 2010 12:55 am #

    Hello.

    I recently had bad case of virus infections on an old HDD, with lots of office data on it. It infected XP badly, and I had to get a new HDD with a fresh install of XP. Both HDDs are the relatively older versions, with the 40 pin connector and the 4 pin standard for power.

    Since, I have the old HDD as a slave. The computer boots up, telling me that the HDD still works. However, I can’t access it through My Computer, it says it needs to format it first. I am worried, that if I go ahead and format, I stand to loose all my data.

    Is this true? Can I use RAI or DTI Data recovery to get all my data back? I don’t wish to have an OS on this drive, just need it for data storage now.

    Thank you for any and all help.

  394. Geoff February 12, 2010 2:12 am #

    Hi, I was trying to boot from my XP cd to remove a worm (because worm caused user logon screen to log me on then immediately log me off again) but somehow my system went into installing XP again. I pulled the cd to stop the process, but now can’t do anything at all without system asking me to re-insert XP cd to continue setup.
    I have since installed a new HDD set as master with the old set as slave, installed XP on the new drive & checked that all worked well. Powered down, connected the old drive (slave) & booted up. Screen now hangs after identifying that there are two HDD’s & offers ‘press del to enter setup’. If I leave it long enough I get ‘primary drive failure – F1 to Continue, or DEL to enter setup. If I hit F1 the master HDD is bypassed & secondary boot drive (old HDD) boots & puts me back to square one asking me to install XP cd so that setup can continue. It seems as if this is the only thing I can do i.e. to complete the setup process (which will wipe the HDD of about 20 GB of music) then turn to your recovery software.
    My question is will your s/ware be able to recover my music/pics after Windows has been re-installed on this drive?
    Thanks in advance.

  395. Dean February 13, 2010 2:45 pm #

    Thank you for your very detailed instructions. I haven’t touched the old beast for quite some time. My wife uses it for taxes and stuff and suddenly it wouldn’t boot up one day. I was pretty sure it was the video card so I thought about sticking it in our other old beast. I did it on my own and forgot that I needed to set the pins. If it wasn’t for this tutorial I would have probably never figured it out and ended up chucking the whole thing in the trash.
    And best of all, my wife now thinks I’m a hero. The drive worked in the other machine and we are able to access all of our files. So thank you!

  396. Mary February 15, 2010 1:07 pm #

    Thanks for this information. I didn’t even know how to identify my hard drive until I read this. I was able to find it and remove it, which was all I needed. Great information and pictures.

  397. marty February 22, 2010 5:23 pm #

    i have a 2005 MCE (a1125c) top of the line pc in ’05 all i have added is a tv card and thats all.the hard drive is “st3250823as” and its my third single install they die after a couple of years this time i was prepared i have an external seagate 320gb and have used it to store imformation but i let a month slip by and she crashed. i booted up one day and it ran chdsk a whole bunch of errors once it was done 3-4 hours later it rebooted and will not go past loading desktop (explore has to close) desktop will not showup and it will not connect to internet(duhh) i went to alt-crtl-delete and none of my files are there, the hard drive still works and i have the recovery disk but i want to get the files that i didnt save back ,also the hard drive is dedicated to the recovery disk,i have another drive and tried to load the recovery disk to but it would not load the MCE portion anly the windows xp pro version and the i need to add sound card and a bunch of other stuff so that option didnt work can give some advice (i have found this hdd online so i plan on buying 2 and do raid 0 so that i will not loose files again but i still need help recoverying files now.

  398. rhythm February 27, 2010 9:15 am #

    hello mam Jacqui Best this is rhythm here from India i want to ask you that when we try to install the win98 some time why its shows a less free space instant of full space of 80 gb hdd? it is a hint of a bad cluster in this hdd? can you plz give me a some tips so that i can check the hdd in better way…..plz waiting forward to your reply thanks

    regarding
    rhythm
    india

  399. james February 28, 2010 9:01 am #

    how can i restore everything on a laptop acer extenza 5620z its real slow and no f10 option also cant restore from setup menu???

  400. Jeff February 28, 2010 11:58 pm #

    Pulled out 2 hds out of failed HP laptop. I put both in external drive case intending to use as external hard drive back ups. The second hd (listed as data when looking at my computer and the drive) allows me to copy data, but he the primary, when hooked up via USB ( says OS before the drive info) seems to want to “control” the computer. Is there something I need to do to access data on the old primary drive as this drive has all the important data I’m trying to copy to new computer….hope this makes sense….thanks

  401. Count Zero March 3, 2010 4:21 pm #

    So I have an OS HD that I can’t boot from because nvata.sys (nForce HD driver) is missing / corrupted (it appears to have been hit by a rootkit and AV quarantined it).

    Q being: should I just hook the subject drive into another PC as a second drive to get the files, or should I slave it and do recovery? Seems like just hooking it up as a second drive would suffice, but I didn’t know if it would confuse things since it was a boot/OS drive.

    Both PCs using NTFS so no worries there — damaged is XP Pro and good one is Vista. All I really need to get off the old drive is some pictures and the Outlook mailbox if possible.

    Great tutorial by the way!!!

  402. Dan Hammerly March 11, 2010 11:26 am #

    I have an older HP which decided to get a mind of its own and will not start at all. Has power but thats all it has. I have another newer HP and was thinking of taking the old one and make it a slave so that I can retrieve some programs and data. If I can do this, would it be feasible to move those programs and files to an external drive and then reformat the slave and use it as an additional drive OR can I just delete all the windows files on it and be OK. Admittedly, I am a novice at working on the inside of a computer other than adding memory. I would sincerely appreciate you opinion and/or guidance if you have the time. Your site and the video is the best I’ve seen and very well presented. Will tell everyone I know about it. Thanks so much for your time.

  403. Lance March 15, 2010 3:31 pm #

    I have a drive which has lost some dll files so will not start up. I have tried connecting to another computer but will not transfer certain folders as windows says they are protected. How can I get round this as would take forever to Authorise every single file as a new ownership of the files on the other computer!!
    I am trying to retrieve these files for a friend and needs to be done asap.

  404. Dago March 18, 2010 2:39 pm #

    Do EIDE & IDE hard drives use the same flat ribbon cables? I want to slave an EIDE hd to PC an older IDE hd and a single flat ribbon cable, so I have to buy a double one but have the EIDE-IDE confusion as far as the cable used.

  405. Psmith April 8, 2010 10:46 am #

    I have an Acer Power 285 circa 2006 that was freezing up and would not boot up consistantly. I want to recover data from the drive by setting it up as slave on another PC, both are XP home.
    My problem is the Drive is a Hitachi HDS728080PLA380 and does not use a standard ribbon cable to connect to the mother board. I uses a DT SATA-2 Signal 4S352-032 cable with 7 contact points and another cable beside it with 15 contact points. There are no jumper I can see to set it to slave vs master configuration, std ribbon cable does seem to connect. My question is can I connect this to another PC as a slave to recover data, and if so how?

    • DTI Data Recovery April 12, 2010 10:58 am #

      Psmith – SATA hard drives don’t have jumpers, if you hook it up to another machine that has SATA ports, you will see on the motherboard “Drive 0” which will default as the master, and then “Drive 1” which will default as a slave. Be careful with the connections.

      Here is a link to a video we did when the SATA cables were not hooked up correct

      Also there is a video here that explains hard drive form factors

  406. jorge vargas April 12, 2010 9:23 am #

    it is great when somebody teach you what to do…go on you are great…. sigan adelante estan super bien, by the way hi there from Ecuador

  407. AA April 19, 2010 10:02 am #

    I can not get in to my computer and I need to access my files…it just keeps restarting and I get a flash of a blue screen just before it restarts itself. I tried to do a recovery console but my machine won’t recognize the XP Cd. I’m at a loss..I can access the “Bios” but not “Safe mode” PLEASE HELP!!!

  408. sam112mughal April 24, 2010 11:43 am