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My computer does not recognize friend's internal drive on bootup

2K views 10 replies 3 participants last post by  cowpuncher 
#1 ·
Greetings,

My friend's PC has some issues, and she is afraid of losing all the pictures she has accumulated over the years on her internal drive.

She has given me her internal HD (Seagate Barracuda 7200.12, 250GB) and I would like to copy the contents of it to one of my external drives for her. I removed my drive from my pc, and booted, but the BIOS did not detect her HD. My HD is a Barracuda 7200.10, 250GB, so I would think it is not too different from hers.

I would like to be able to boot into her drive without formatting the drive. How can I achieve this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Shawn
 
#2 ·
Booting YOUR system with HER HDD is NOT a good idea; unless you have VERY similar motherboards (same chipsets at least), her HDD does NOT have the drivers installed that will allow it to boot with YOUR motherboard. Other drivers might not match (audio, video, etc.), but those are not as important to the bootup process as the chipset drivers.

You're risking her data by trying to boot with her HDD; please SHUT DOWN and UNPLUG the system, then remove her HDD NOW, so we can (hopefully) avoid corrupting her data to the point where it becomes unrecoverable.

Next bit of advice: do NOT try to BOOT her drive; it would be MUCH better to boot the system with YOUR HDD and install HER HDD as a secondary drive. That way, you won't put her data at risk, and with a little luck, you can transfer the files / photos she wants to save onto your HDD in case her HDD is heading to The Last Roundup.

While you're doing that, I'll keep typing and post again with some advice on the best way for you to accomplish your goals. Of course, the fact that your system cannot detect her HDD is NOT a good sign, but we might be able to work around that.

I also need some more information from you; is HER HDD an IDE drive, or a SATA drive? I suspect it is an SATA drive, but IIRC, Seagate DID make some 7200.12 IDE drives, so please clarify that for us. ALSO, I need to know whether YOUR HDD is IDE or SATA.

Next, what OS is installed on HER drive? What OS is installed on YOUR drive?

Please answer my questions while I do some more typing; I'll post here again as soon as I can.
 
#3 ·
Greetings,

Thanks for the words of warning. I tried a few times, but could not proceed past the PC trying to boot into windows and then shutting down. Hopefully, I did not do too much damage in my ignorance.

My HD and hers are both SATA. I am running Windows Ultimate 7, but I am not sure as to what her OS is. I will have to verify with her tomorrow. However, I am assuming it will be Vista or 7, as she bought her system shortly after I bought mine, I believe.

I did some research online and read about booting it as a slave drive. However, there are no additional set of cables within my PC to connect an additional SATA HD, so I am assuming I will need to buy something that enables multiple connections? Am I on the right track with that assumption?

Thanks a million,
Shawn
 
#5 · (Edited)
SATA drives do not work in a Master / Slave chain; they are each installed as stand-alone devices. You could use her SATA cable to attach her HDD to your motherboard, but as joeten has mentioned, there are other options available, and I'm still in the process of writing more advice for you; I'll post it as soon as I can. If you choose to install her HDD with a SATA cable, you will have to be SURE that the system will boot ONLY from YOUR HDD, not her HDD.

Under those circumstances, I STRONGLY recommend that you use an external enclosure, as joeten mentioned; I'll have more details about that for you in my next post, so stay tuned... I'm typing as fast as I can... which might not be saying much...
 
#6 ·
OK, FINALLY finished this! Read it and ponder...

In order to access the photos on her HDD, you can install her HDD in an external enclosure and connect it to your system with a USB 2.0 cable; if you choose to use this method, be SURE to SCAN her ENTIRE HDD with good AV / antimalware programs BEFORE you begin to transfer any files from one system to the other. Among other benefits, doing this will allow you to AVOID trying to have her HDD detected by your system BIOS, which can open a can of worms you don't want to deal with if her HDD is failing.

I realize that you might think that this is (or SHOULD be) a simple process and that you don't need to take these precautions, but you have no way of knowing if her HDD is infected with some program that will attack YOUR data. Furthermore, if her drive is failing, her data is at risk of loss at any time; booting an HDD puts more stress on the HDD components. If you put her HDD into an external enclosure, you reduce the stress significantly, so with a little luck, the HDD will survive long enough to transfer her files to a folder on your system. Once that is done, you can copy them to optical discs, or a flash drive, or whatever storage media you prefer.

You can buy an external enclosure for a reasonable price; I own seven, and just ordered two more (from Newegg) earlier this week. I admit that I'm a cheapskate; after I bought my first external enclosure (from Newegg), I used it to rescue data from HDDs owned by clients. After a while, I got tired of swapping HDDs, so I bought a second enclosure (you know where), then a third, and so on. I use one or another frequently, and having extra units saves me a great deal of time. Once you buy one, you'll wonder why you waited so long to get it...

Of course, you can also install her HDD as a secondary drive in your system; if her HDD is a SATA device, it will run on a SATA channel. If it is an IDE device, you'll need to install it alone on the Secondary IDE channel, or attach it as a Slave to another IDE device, or set it as Master to some other IDE component. No matter how you look at it, using this method can become very complicated, ESPECIALLY if your system fails to detect her HDD, which is why I recommend using an external enclosure to rescue her data.

There are also other adapters available, but in my opinion, they can confuse people who aren't closet hardware geeks, so I think it would be best to work with an external enclosure. You'll need to buy one designed for a SATA drive, or one designed to accept both SATA and IDE drives, and be sure that it is for a 3.5" drive, NOT a 2.5" laptop HDD.

Good luck with this; let us know what you decide to do, or if you have any more questions.
 
#7 ·
:pray:

Thank you both very much for your help. I will try the USB enclosure method. I am assuming that if I do it that way, then my PC will just recognize it like another external hdd.

I will order one from Taobao (I am currently living in China) and let you guys know how it goes.

Thanks a million. :)

Regards,
Shawn
 
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