[wildYetti]

I have a gateway. It had a 400 gig hard disk that I'm assuming caught a virus and Vista would not load up past the first startup screen. I swaped out with new 500 gig got Vista installed I want to try to recover pics and music off 400g drive then wipe and use as more storage. I have it set as slave in BIOS and tried secondary it will not let the new drive load vista its doing the same thing as it would if the old drive were primary. But when I unplug old drive vista boots up fine with the new 500g. how do I get to Windows off new drive with old drive plug ed in and drag files over? Thanks a bunch

 

[Networks]

What type of interface are these drives IDE ? SATA ? I suspect IDE based on your post and it seems both drives may be jumpered as master and the old drive needs to be set as "slave" if on the same ide cable.

 

[wildYetti]

They are both on diff SATA cables but also jumped on another cable not quite sure.

 

[Networks]

the same thing as it would if the old drive were primary.

Can you tell us more about the "same thing" what is the original symptom ? Its starting to sound like the old hard drive is having problems.

 

[wildYetti]

When I would start up my desktop I would see the gateway screen where you go BIOS and boot menu then it would continue to the Windows screen with the loading bar at the bottom like normal. Screen would go black like it should for a few seconds heading toward the login screen. But it would remain black and never go to login. Tried in safemode still the same. So my new hard driveworks great i have it set as primary master and tried my old one as primary slave and secondary slave and windows won't start when its plugged in it never gets to login. But it runs fine without it. I really just want to save my kids pics. Off it any ideas?

 

[Networks]

Sounds to me like its getting to a bad spot on the drive and cannot read or recover and continue to move forward thus hangs the interface. If you have anyway to connect the drive in an external USB enclosure you may have a shot at reading the drive its worth a shot otherwise you are probably looking to send it out for data recovery.