Slave Hard Drive

I am trying to connect a hard drive (as a slave) that is damaged in order to run some data recovery software on it. I haven't done this before so please excuse any stupidity. I connected the drive to the middle plug on the IDE cable (between the original drive and the motherboard) but when I start the computer nothing much happens. All I get is a message that the CD drives have been renumbered (from 2 and 3 to 3 and 4, so the new drive must be detected in some way) but then it says that there is no operating system found.

Could it be that the computer is trying to boot from the new drive instead of the original? Is there something other than the placement on the cable that controls this?

Thanks in advance.

 

You need to set the jumper(s) on the back of the drive to a Slave setting. That depends on the drive, there is no standard setting, but it should be marked on the label.

Without setting it as a Slave, you have 2 Masters on the cable and there will be a conflict, hence the problem finding the operating system.

Otherwise you are right on track.

A good clear well described post!.
Makes the task of helping a pleasure! Welcome to TSG.

 

Additionally, this conflict may cause the contents of the hard drive/s to be scrambled.

 

Um.. Adding a bad harddrive to a system can cause weirdness of all sorts.. If you have it jumpered correctly, you should use a dos based recovery tool, (like ghost)
that way, windows isn't involved, and cant screw up the process

 

drkilldrmz,

That's very true, HOWEVER, sometimes it's the only way to find out IF the hard drive in question is truly bad. Liz

 

You should have an operating system bootable on the master disk.

The slave can be set as slave as suggeested by others or alternatively setting to cable selct will do the same as the unit has been connected to the middle plug. Generally it is safer to have both units set to cable select and the drive at the end of the cable automatical a master.

Some BIOS don't allow a slave to boot.

The damage disk should come up as another drive allowing you to copy its content out.

 

He did say it was damaged... Im sure it should be ok to boot it, but if it exhibits strange behavior like going Veeerrrrryyyy slow, or makes a loud noise, I have had better luck with dos based recovery utils. There is a really nice windows based utility callled Get Data Back i have used with good success.. Even on a drive not recognized by windows.

 

Where can we find this utitilty, drkilldrmz?

The only hard drive utility I've heard of was one from Hitachi and it was posted on a thread in the Windows XP board...I'll have to go dig it up...brb. Liz

 

heres the link. It has recovered at least 10 drives for me. Im pretty sure that the demo only allows you to view recoverable items though..;(

http://www.runtime.org/

 

And here's the link to the Hitachi one from the Windows XP board: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Thanks for the link. Liz

 

I didn't mean to confuse.. I was referring to data recovery, and not an actual low level hard drive formatting tool. I haven't had too much luck with a low level format, but have read that some do. If he's replacing the drive, my suggestion would be , before anything goes onto the new drive, just ghost over an image. If a fresh re-install was what he wanted, then he could slabe the old drive after he installed an os on the new one, but i find it unreliable to try to copy data over that way. Might work, but if not, a dos based utility may have better luck. Or.. a recovery tool like getdataback.

 

And I do appreciate yours...we need a link like that and didn't have one in our arsenal. Thanks to your post, we do now. It takes all kinds of utilities to find out what's wrong with hardware these days, doesn't it? And to recover what is on it. Liz

 

Wow, thanks for all your input guys!

1) using cable select; how do I go about doing this? Is there a bios setting or some other method of controlling this? I think this might be my preference.

2) Jumpers; In case cable select doesn't work, Kiwiguy you say that I need to add a jumper on the right pins to indicate that it is a master? Now will it be jumpered already and I should reposition the jumper or does it default to a certain setting and adding the jumper indicates otherwise? Finally, is the needed jumper position shown on the drive?

3) For anyone who has used Get Data Back, I had someone run this on the drive once with a fair level of success but a number of files appeared to be recoved, however when they were opened the contents were all messed up (i.e. erased, scrambled etc.). Will re-running the program possibly have better luck or are those files pretty much dead?

Sorry for the essay.

 

1. cable select may be an option with your jumper settings, it's like an auto setting if you have a cable select IDE cable where the first (end of cable) drive is master and the middle connection goes on the slave.
shouldn't need to go into bios or anything, it's a matter of having the drive(s) capable of it and the IDE cable
- check your hdd manual or the top of the hdd should show the jumper alternatives
[what kind of hdd is it, model etc, may help in answering]

2. same thing, look at the sticker on the drive, should show settings

also: check the master drive settings, it may need to be jumpered as master with slave, and the slave jumpered as slave
- you need to have both jumpered properly depending on the make/model, age etc
(newer ones tend to give fewer hassles IME)

 

1. Since when I connected the two drives with the desired slave in the middle and there was "no operating system found" can I conclude that the IDE cable is not capable of cable select?

2. The second hard drive is a 2.5" laptop hard drive, so there are no jumper settings to indicate it as a slave. Is that a problem?