Adding a hard drive to a computer

[jayman_777]

Ok, so now that I have decided that my hard drive will not boot windows no matter what I do, I am going to try and recover the information that is on the drive, by using another computer.

Does anyone know the best way to do this? How do I set it up in the new computer? IE: The orignial hard drive from the new computer with an OS already on it, as the Primary master, and the hard drive from the second computer as the slave? Sounds like a dumb question, but what cables do I use, meaning, how do I set up the hard drives? Black connector to the first HD, then the grey to the HD that won't boot, then the blue connector into the MB?

What I ultimately want to do is use windows 98 to sift through the drive and bacuk up all of the stuff that is worthwhile onto CD-rom. I will then re-install the HD into the original computer and go from there.

Anyone have any ideas?

[Penguin]

Yes you are right. Make the harddrive that you are having problems with the Primary slave. remmber to set the jumpers on both harddrives. Reboot system.

Now the second harddrive should be deteched if you have autodetect selected in the bios. The system should boot up fine.

However you will have to watch if you have multiple partions on each HD. For instance if on the good HD you have drives C, D, and E, and on the Bad HD you have drives C, D, E, and F, your drives will show up as follows:

C - "C" on Good HD
D - "C" on Bad HD
E - "D" on Good HD
F - "E" on Good HD
G - "D" on Bad HD
H - "E" on Bad HD
I - "F" on bad HD

This can get confusing if you don't pay attention. You should be able to backup from here.

Hope I didn't confuse you. If I did maybe someone else can clarify.

[jayman_777]

Sounds about as clear as mud... But I'll get it running. I'm not planning on doing this today, I 'm attempting to get my computer up and running again, and nothing is working, so I'm wiping the drive clean and starting over.

Very frustrating considering all I was doing was trying to intall a stupid modem.

[racerbrownn]

before you get all ripped about the partition issue, the pc should have a connector on the middle of the hdd cable that is free, this is the place to plug in the extra damaged hdd. if on a udma socket, set the extra drive as cable select, if on a ide socket, set as slave and make sure the current hdd in the pc is set to master. if the pc see's an active partition, the pc may not boot. if so, unhook extra drive and post results either way. p.s. check to irq posts for help from your pc freinds who are still trying to help.

[christo418]

jayman-
Can you be more specific about your hard drive "not boot windows"? Are you getting errors on the screen? Are you able to POST? Have you used your Emergency Rescue Disk to boot to DOS and examine?