arstacey

I have a system with two hard drives, a 40gb and an 80 gb (master/slave). My OS was fracked to pieces and the hard drive was getting errors so I replaced it with a 60gb. Now my 80gb won't read. This one has ALL my backup data on it so it is VERY important that I recover this.

I made sure that all the jumper settings are correct. I even set them both to master adn put the 80 ona separate ids interface. I then took it out of the computer and put it in an external ide to USB enclosure. Sometimes it shows up in Computer Management but its status is unreadable and only shows in the lower window of disk managment. It is not showing up in bios but my bios has two sopts where it shows drive info. THe first test shows nothing but when it lists everything right before the OS boots, it lists the drive but not it's size. What can I do?

linderman

have you tried putting both drives on the same cable / the OS drive as Master and the 80 gig drive as slave ?????

I would not mess around trying the USB enclosure until you have things ironed out. The direct connection of the drive to the motherboard ide controller is far more dependable, if you cant get hings stable like that; the usb enclosure will only muddy the water.

Most likely; your partition info for the slave drive and drive parameters were written to the OS drive >>>>> I really get annyoed with that. Thats why I always partition and format drives all by themselves >>>>> dont give the OS a choice where to write the drive parameters.

you could try this program to fix your drive

www.p-t-d-d.com you will need to manually enter the web address in your browser and remove the hypens / this software is an excellent drive partition and MBR correction tool but they got banned from our forum for spamming. But none the less they are excellent at partition resolution.

here is the 2nd choice >>>> free but in my opinion not nearly an equal performer

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

let us know how you progress / dont hesitiate to ask questions

regards

joe

arstacey

When I install the drive as either the slave with my OS drive set to master, or both to Cable Select, it never shows in the system. The only time I can get anything about it to register is when I use the encloure. But when I do that, it only shows in Disk Management under Computer Management. It reads

Disk 4
Unknown

Unreadable.

It is spinning and sounds fine, no clicking or scraping. The enclosure has a light that is green when Idle and red when it is reading or writing. The light is always red now.

Tumbleweed36

Hi,

Back up just a bit. What brand names are the drives you are working with and how do you have them positioned on the ribbon cable? Which one is on the end and which one on the middle connector? I do agree with linderman, leave the external case alone for right now and see if you can get this fixed to keep the mix low and not complicated.

arstacey

They are both Maxtor drives. The OS Dive is on teh end of the cable with the one that is not working in the middle.

For sh**s n giggles, I installed the bad drive on the end as a master (I also tried CS) and a cdrom on the secondary ide as the master and booted to the windows install cd. The install utility said it could not find any hard drives on the computer.

Tumbleweed36

Hi,

First of all, if you have done this, just do it again to make sure we are set up correctly.

Use the computer you are writing from and download the Maxtor utility to prepare the new drive like partition and format it, because it must have that done to work correctly.


On IDE#1, put your boot drive on the end of the ribbon cable and double check the settings to make sure it is master. I know, it was there before, but do it again anyway, just to make sure it is master.

On IDE #1, put your slave drive in the middle of the ribbon cable and double check the settings to make sure the jumpers are set to slave.

On IDE #2, put your CDrom at the end postion set as master.

Shut down, put the utility in the A: drive and prepare the drive. Important: Make sure you are preparing your slave and not erasing your boot drive.

Alternate: If the above does not work, the it might even be a good idea to put the new drive in on the end of the cable set as master and prepare it alone if you have to do that. Then put it back to slave and it should be ready to go.


Note: What we see so many times is someone will buy a new drive and put it in without checking (assuming) the other drive on that cable. Inspect BOTH very carefully for the jumper settings. I am not saying you did, but we get so many that just overlook the setting on the drive that works and assumes it is set to master when it is a lot of times Cable Select.

Post back, we just have to be missing something here.

arstacey

My new drive works fine. I installed windows to it yesterday. I didn't even take the bad drive out originally. I removed the 40gb drive which was failing , set my new one to master adn slid it into the 40gb' sslot. I installed windows, everything went fine. It was when I went to get some software to reinstall from teh 80 gb (currently bad) drive that I noticed my slave drive was no longer working.

I am 99.999 percent sure it is not a setting problem. I have redone the settings a hundred times. I have used every combination, put it in multiple computers, and an external enclosure all to no avail. I tried the software you recomended, the PC Inspector, but it only saw a drive if it was in the enclosure. when I tried to search it from there I got NT Read Error.