[sls2k8]

going back a few years i had an old dell laptop, which broke and i no longer have. i still have the old HDD and now wish to access this drive, i have tried to put the old hard drive into my new computer but i get the blue screen telling me the HDD does not recognise my hardware. i was just wondering what my options would be, is there anyway of recovering the information off it?? thanks in advance.

[philthomas]

Try putting it in a 2.5" USB External Enclosure.

If it's a working drive, it will show up, when you plug it in

[spot]

Or hang it onto your IDE cable as a secondary drive, that way you don't need to buy anything.

If it's a NTFS partition you want to get into you'll need a live DVD like knoppix to subvert the ownership rights to copy the files off. Microsoft operating systems like to pretend that the files in all the My Documents parts of the file tree are owned by people other than you so you mayn't see them.

[sls2k8]

ive tried booting 2 different versions of linux, but it said something about meida cables missing. iv also tried to install windows on an external HDD i have and even tried "mac-on-stick" but for some reason my computer will not boot these. thank you both for your help, i would like to try and do it without buying an enclosure, but if the worst comes to the worst then i will buy en enclosure.

[spot]

It's why I named a particular flavour of linux. If you've not used it before you might need talking through it anyway.

Lots of machines won't boot off USB.

There's so many combinations of ways of doing this that it's hard to make a sensible suggestion. You have a new computer with a new hard drive. You presumably have a writable DVD. We don't quite know what your old drive's partitioned like or formatted as yet. We don't know what your new drive's partitioned like or formatted as either. We have no idea how many MB or GB of data you want to retrieve. All that comes into it.

[sls2k8]

thank you for sticking with me mate. i believe it is FAT32 formatted and it is only a 20GB drive. its single partition and i think it will be maybe max of 1GB of information i need to retrieve. i do have a DVDRW. and have never really used linux so any help in this are would be appreciated. sorry for taking so much of your time.

[spot]

Given what you've said, there's no need for linux at all.

If you put the old drive on as a secondary drive (you need to jumper it to say SLAVE) and if the BIOS is set to automatically detect it (which it ought to be) then bringing up your standard new drive operating system as normal will let Windows Explorer see the new drive (under All Drives). You can find the files and copy them to the new drive just as you would from any subdirectory.

If you need more detail on any of that, say so and we'll break it down.

[sls2k8]

could you explain a lil more then please? i can see what your saying,jus would like to know exactly what i would need to carry this out? thank you again

[spot]

Your motherboard has IDE channels. You probably have an IDE cable in at least one of them.

On that IDE cable is probably a DVD drive. If you have two DVD drives then there might be two on the cable in which case you could replace the current slave with the old hard drive. If you have an IDE cable with only one device on it you could add the old drive to that cable.

If you have no IDE cables at all then you have a really really new computer.

Anyway, it involves you taking the case door off with the computer unplugged and looking around. IDE cables are often ribbon cables. Using your motherboard manual would be a good idea.

The back of the old drive will have a jumper and three pin pairs it can fit on, MA (master) CS (cable select) and SL (slave). Put the jumper across the slave pin pair.

Powering up after that might give you what you want. If not, power up and go into the BIOS and jot down what the drives currently say and come back and tell us that and what the motherboard is.

[sls2k8]

the IDE connectors in my desktop are too big for the pins on the HDD, does it have something to do with the fact that the HDD came from a laptop?

[spot]

YES!!!!!!!!!! My fault, I dropped the laptop concept some posts back.

What you need is a £5 IDE 2.5" to 3.5" converter from your local computer hardware store.

Leave it set as a master - don't jumper it.

Assuming you have an IDE cable that goes just to the DVD drive(s) then take ALL the DVDs off that cable and put the laptop drive onto it by way of the converter.

You *can* instead get an external drive holder for a 2.5" drive that goes into a USB2 port, that costs a bit more.

[spot]

Hang on... "i have tried to put the old hard drive into my new computer but i get the blue screen" - is this new computer a laptop as well?

[sls2k8]

new ish. year and a half old but i also have a brand new desktop. i think the blue screen cums up cos of the change of hardware. and the registry is looking for things that arnt there. would i be right??

[sls2k8]

yes it is soz... cant read... too tired

[spot]

Either you can try it my way in the desktop then, or you can get a USB2 housing and read it externally. Both need a bit of kit buying.