[political]

I will be trying all this in a few hours when I get home, but one last question:

My current computer (the one which the corrupt drive is currently residing in) is vastly superior in processing power and memory to the much older computer that I will use for the test - in fact, the older computer is from 2001 and has difficulty just dealing with the modern-day demands of running XP.

Would I be better off taking the healthy hard drive from the old computer, placing it alongside the corrupt drive in my new computer, and setting the healthy one to "master" and the duff one to "slave". Would this be safe?

[Hybr!d]

The drive from the older other machine will not boot in the newer one.

Windows installs are particular to the hardware in your PC and every PC is different.

Stop worrying about problems, just plug the drive into a working PC and see if it allows you to access it.

Providing the donor PC can and is running Windows that is all you need.

[political]

OK Dave, point taken.

Will update you in a few hours (if you still care by then...)

[Hybr!d]

No problem, good luck.

[political]

Just a quick update to let you know I haven't solved the problem and forgotten about the help you gave me:

I went ahead with the plan to install the corrupt drive as a slave into the old 2001 machine.

After spending hours backing up all data from the old machine (I know there's no real "risk", but i'm not taking any chances anymore!), I opened it up to find that the master/slave cable was not compatible with my 2006 corrupt hard drive! The connector plug was much too large for the socket on my hard drive!

So tonight, I will be attempting this again on a much newer machine (I think it's from around 2004/2005) - which I pray will be compatible!

Also, while i'm here - one more question if you will:

If I find I can access some intact files, should my first action be to get them the hell off of there ASAP? If so, does it matter whether I copy or move them?

[philthomas]

It sounds like you have a SATA drive and the old PC had IDE Drive(s)/Cables, which are larger.
If it's a SATA drive you have no jumpers to set to Slave, so you can forget about that.

If you can read anything on the drive .... copy it off as your first task, as you wont get many tries.

[political]

I know what you mean about setting jumpers to slave, but what's this about SATA drives having no jumpers? Surely I can still make it act as a slave drive?

[political]

I'm basically doing what I did yesterday - posting to this forum from work, discussing what exactly to do when I get home.

With the info i've gathered today, it's looking very likely that the machine I was to use for testing tonight is unfortunately going to have an IDE motherboard. It was bought in January 2005, so was likely produced in late 2004. I've contacted Dell and they've told me they began using SATA technology in early 2005 (the machine is not a Dell - I do not know the brand, but I assumed Dell were amongst the first to utilise the new standard).

If this is the case, can I ask for an opinion on using SATA to IDE converters?

Thanks again for all the continued support.

[philthomas]

With SATA, you just use a spare SATA port .... there is no Master or Slave.

If the mobo on the newer PC has SATA, just plug it in to a spare port and it should pick up automatically (assuming the drive hasn't died). Each port supports one drive only, unlike IDE, hence no Master or Slave.

See what you have first before concerning yourself with SATA/IDE converters. Many mobos have IDE and SATA Ports, if so you can mix drives ok.

[political]

EVERYTHING IS OK!!!

I can't believe it, but after all i've worried about in the past 48 hours, and being such a royal pain in the *** to all of you - do you want to know what happened?

To begin with, I must have been extremely lucky that the other machine did indeed use SATA technology, despite being built around 4 years ago.

So I hooked up my hard drive, started the machine, and the first thing I was greeted with was a Windows screen strongly recommending that I perform a consistency check on one of the drives. So of course I went ahead with it (syscheck) - it found and deleted/replaced several indexes. I then went on into Windows, accessed my data and everything seemed absolutely fine!

Of course, my first action was to copy EVERYTHING onto my external hard drive, but nontheless i'm getting the feeling the drive may actually be "repaired" and safe to use again.

Presumably, the problem was very small, but the files that were affected were so fundamental to Windows boot sequence that it failed completely - could that be the case?

I have yet to try it again on my own machine - i'll be doing that tonight, but i'm guessing it will be fine. What's important is that I have everything successfully copied!

(BTW: I was too dumb to think of trying to boot the 2004 machine up from my "repaired" drive while it was still in there!)