Installing a slave hdd... with data

[Ayano]

I've recently just recovered from a complete system meltdown (corrupt bios, motherboard fired(somewhat), burnt PU and other things that just so happened without me knowing of it earlier.

When I say recover, I mean I basically purchased a new PC and now I'm trying to install my old hdd (uncorrupt) to recover my old data, or at least the more important portions.

All the hdd installation tutorials I looked at require the drive to be formatted once installed, thus losing all the previous data that was on the drive. Is there an alternative that would allow me to just 'plug and play' or at least plug and use the recover command in dos?

Massive edit:

That new computer I was talking about is now up and running and it came with a master and slave drive so my old hdd with the data I need is likely to become my 3rd hdd if that's possible.

Upon booting up, it turns out the new drive isn't even listed in my computer or in the device manager. Instead, it turns out I have 2 floppy drives, one A, and another B. The B works as if it were my old fdd, but the A does nothing and I suspect its the slave hdd wrongly labeled. It's weird that it would take my floppy's drive name and shunt it over to B.

My fdd is one of those super diskdrives and is named under the designation of 'MITBISHI LS-120 COSM 02' in the device manager while the A drive is labeled as 'Floppy disk drive'. The Misbishi name is the appropriate name for the super disk drive (those weird 256mb disks). problem is, how do I get the computer to recognize the slave drive which is now labeled A? What exactly should i do in the bios which doesn't even list the slave drive? (intel board d845bg) both drives are Maxtor and their jumper settings are set appropriately.

Massive edit #2

I've entered the intel bios and under the boot menu, i see the following

Quiet boot [enabled]
Intel(R) Rapid BIOS Boot [enabled]
Scan User flash area [disabled]
USB Boot [enabled]

>Boot device priority
>Hard Disk Drives
>Removable devices
>ATAPI CDROM Drives

whats odd is that under hard drives, I only see the primary maxtor drive, the master and thats it. Under removable devices however I see

1st Removable Device [1st floppy drive]
2nd Removable Device [LS-120 COSM 02]

the 2ns is the superdisk drive, but the 1st looks a bit odd.

[iKillburger]

with my hdd's i could (essentially) plug and play them.

are these sata or ide?

[Ayano]

ide

[Ayano]

this is killing me, and my labtop (which i'm using to post here) is crashing every hour or so

my current pci setup

(master)-------(slave [old hdd])---------(mobo)
(Cdrom)--------(dvd)-------------------(mobo)
(floppy)---------(unused junction)-------(PCI bus card)

my bios is telling me that my primary IDE Master and slave are 'Not Installed'

:censored2

[flibb]

Remove all drives and pci add-ins and disable them in the bios except what is needed to start the computer. Then focus on getting the problem drive to work. Set the drive you want to recover from as the master on IDE2 and copy the files over.

In the bios settings somewhere there should be an option to autodetect the IDE drives settings. For any unused IDE channels set them to not installed. If the autodetect doesn't detect the drives correctly (then there's likely a problem with the drive or mobo) you can try entering the values manually, but they must be exactly right or you will cause data loss.

Have you checked the product page for this mobo? http://www.intel.com/support/motherb...esktop/d845bg/

The latest BIOS update and Windows drivers are there, as well as the manual in pdf which explains all the BIOS settings.

[Ayano]

Yes I did check the product page.

I got my main drive working again, it seems that whenever I try to connect the slave drive both hdds are seen as 'not installed' . Any solutions?

Edit:

now it refuses to work regardless, now the main drive on its own wont boot.

[Ewan]

I don't know who told you that "installing a slave hard drive requires it to be reformatted". That's bullshit, you should have simply been able to plug it in and boot up. If it's an old drive, you may need to look up how hte jumper should be orientated.

Right, as Flibb said, unplug everything. The only things you need in are:
CPU
RAM
Graphics Card
Hard Drives

So your CD Drives and your superdisk (wtf is that?) drive should not be plugged in.

Don't run the hard drives as one on master, one on slave. Your motherboard should have 2 IDE channels (read: sockets), put both the harddrives as masters, one on each channel. When you go into BIOS, what does it say now? Make sure it's set to boot off the new one, not the old and you should be able to get into Windows and simply copy your data from one drive to the next.

If this doesn't work, then either you've done something wrong, your old HDD is fucked or your MoBo is screwed.

EDIT: You say you bought a new computer? I assume it was an old one, otherwise your main drive would be SATA. If it's SATA then you definitely shouldn't be trying to run the old one as a slave off it as that just doesn't make sense.

[Ayano]

Thanks for the input, as of now, i ripped it down to vid card, mobo, and ram as I got a mem refresh error when i never touched the freakin memory.

The intel board I have only has 2 IDE slots, one for primary (drives) and one for secondary (CDROMS). I'm hoping to use my old drive as a slave so i can't have both hooked up as master.

Are you trying to say that i should just stick to one drive, rip everything i need off my old, then discard it? I could hook both up for that then remove the drive when it's done. This is all assuming I get past this memory refresh error; i don't know how many times I reinstalled the dam mem, it still gives one stupid beep with boot failure:system halt.

Edit: New and fitting the wallet. I don't got much dough on me but I can say the comp shop did stick a brick sized vid card. As for everything else, it was pretty disconfigured when i first opened the box. I guess they decided to slap ATA drives in for budget reasons but went full on with the vid card hoping I wouldn't notice.

Edit#2

I got my main drive working again, i literally ripped out the entire drive cage and I hooked it up that way for less ribbon tangles and such. I disconnected everything but my main drive so that's a good start, I'll try connecting my slave next and if that doesn't work, I'll try Ewan's method.

slave didn't work, I used Ewans method and now it booted up with both drives. Windows hasn't detected it yet and the device manage doesn't let me see it either. In bios it should be listed as secondary master as it's in the appropriately named slot, but it's not. Any way to fix this?

fyi- I'm sticking to this topic so i'll pretty much respond immediately when it updates.

[Ewan]

Just to clarify: Try running the harddrives as one Primary master and one Secondary master until you've got all the stuff you need off it.

[Ayano]

It's not detecting the second drive, but at least it's booting. The 2nd drive is connected in the second ide slot and has it's jumper set to master. My bios can't find it for some reason any way around/through this?

Edit

fixed it through my bios which apparently auto switched to primary ide only, I set it to both and now it's detecting the drive.

[Money]

Yes I did check the product page.

I got my main drive working again, it seems that whenever I try to connect the slave drive both hdds are seen as 'not installed' . Any solutions?

Edit:

now it refuses to work regardless, now the main drive on its own wont boot.

same happened to me on an old computer, seems switching them SOMEHOW CORRUPTED MY HARD DRIVES. it happens

[Ayano]

Heh, I had to revert to the shop drives, my old hdd on it's own on the primary ide cable is undetected. I lost it.

Pissed = yes

Got the slaves working? = yea, between the shop drives easily, but not my old drive.

Next step? fork out cash for data recovery or deal with it.

Its seems more of a mechanical failure as I couldn't hear the arm moving, but the case did get pretty hot. I'm spotting at the possibility of conducting a 'do it yourself job' if that's a valid solution.