I had an old Compaq Presario. Today I replaced it.
I put my old hard drive in…connected it to the the two cables…
The new computer recognizes it. It labeled it “G” but only shows me “Recovery” file folder. It also says the drive is 7 GB instead of 120. None of the old file folders are visable.
So…the point was to copy old files and then have a second hard drive available. Am I allowed to do this? Or does it have to be formatted before the new computer can use it?
Thanks in advance 
Do you have the correct jumper setting on the old drive, making it either a slave or a “cable select” drive? (Actually, I think “cable select” is only used on the master HD, but I am not sure.)
Is the old HD connected to the plug that is closer to the motherboard? (This may be manufacturer specific, so you may want to dig out the user manual.)
Is there a difference in access (FAT32 vs NTFS) between the two drives that you need to identify to the operating system? (I would not think it necessary; I just did exactly what you are describing when Deb upgraded from Win 98SE to a new puter with Win XP and we wanted to drag over a bunch of her old files. The new puter read her FAT32 files with no trouble.)
Lessee…
I don’t know how (or what, lol) the correct jumper setting is set.
For the plug closest to the motherboard…you mean the data cable (whatever it’s called)? There was only one left…
I did a little research on the 'net, and what I’m trying to do sounds awfully complicated. If I weren’t worried about losing this info, it wouldn’t matter.
For backup, I could just hook it up to the old computer and back it up with my portable drive…if the old computer wasn’t fried.
I have another Compaq Presario that’s basically identical (it’s at work), so I really, really, really hope I can just plug it in there as the master and retrieve my info.
You said you did what I did? Did you do anything in particular?
Thanks so much…You’re dealing with a total noob when it comes to installing hard drives
On the back of the HD are three sets of pins. One, with very large pins and a receiving socket that is chamfered on two corners is power. Since your drive is recognized, I am sure you got that right. The long thin row of a whole bunch of pins is the data feed. See next.
The third set of 9 or 10 pins (usually between the other two) allow “jumpers” (little rectangles of plastic with copper inside that are a serious problem for the clumsy to manipulate). If you still have your original manual, get it out, otherwise, go to Google™ and enter your hard drive brand and model and the word “manual” and search around until you find a web site that will provide the manual (usually as a .pdf). (Sometimes you can find a site that will discuss jumpers outside the manual, so try substituting “jumpers” for “manual.”
(For example, in this .pdf guide from Maxtor, on pages 10 and 11 of 32 they discuss various jumper settings for different models. Since I do not know your make, model, etc., I don’t want to confuse the issue by giving directions that conflict with what you find. I will say that nearly all Maxtor drives that I have seen remove the jumper to turn the drive into a slave. READ THE DIRECTIONS. If you have a drive I have not encountered (i.e., most of the drives in the world), you may need to do something completely different.)
The flat data cables with which I have (limited) experience generally have two plugs for hard drives, one on the end and one in the middle, closer to the motherboard. In the cases I have messed with, the master drive gets plugged into the very end while any slave drive gets plugged in using the fixture in the middle of the cable. READ THE DIRECTIONS as noted above.
Basically, all I did was plug the old drive into the middle of the data cable and remove the jumper and it worked like a charm. If my setup was much different than yours, however, my directions may be meaningless.
I’m kind of confused by what you’re sayin gyou did and what you want to do, so I’ll ask some questions.
You have an Old Computer and a New Computer. You Took the Old Drive out of the Old Computer and plugged it into the New Computer, then turned the New Computer on and it showed that the Old Drive was labeled G, was the wrong size and only had one folder (“Recovery”) in it?
To expound on what tomndebb said…
You need to make sure the jumpers are set correctly. Let’s assume your New Drive is set at Master so you don’t have to futz with it. You need to set the Old Drive’s jumper to slave. Here’s a pic of where you can find the jumper. Ignore the settings in that image. There should be a set of tiny pins on the back of the drive, 2 rows, usually 4 or 5 across, hopefully with a little plastic doohickey on 2 of them. On the paper label on top of the drive, or written above this set of pins is a diagram of where you should put the jumper (plastic doohickey) if you want it to be a slave drive. If you don’t see this diagram, tell us the brand and model of the drive and we’ll find the manual.
If your current jumper setting on the Old Drive isn’t slave, you need to change it. If you cen’t get the jumper off the pins, you can carefully use some tweezers to get it out. Or ask someone with more nimble fingers to help. there might be a nice handy ridge around the jumper that lets you grasp it easier with long fingernails. When it’s off, slip it back on to the correct pins.
Once that’s done, plug the IDE cable in…
Your computer has an IDE cable in it with three plugs: one goes into the motherboard, two go in to disk drives. Probably looks like this.Trace it from the motherboard. The middle plug should go into the Old Drive and the top plug should be in the new computer’s drive (New Drive).
Plug the power in, and make sure the drive is seated tightly in the case (IIRC Compaq’s have plastic holders that slide components in and out of the case - you screw the drive into those.)
Now what happens?
Grrr…it actually did take me 10 mins to type that post…
I was expounding on what tomndebb said the first time. The second post is pretty much what i said. So we must be right
Cable select was used with certain IDE controllers to allow the connection of the ribbon cable to determine the drives’ roles as master or slave. All the drives would have the jumpers set to C-SEL, and the drive connected to the Master connector, with pin 28 grounded would be the master drive, and the one connected to the Slave connector with pin 28 unconnected would be the slave drive. It never really caught on for some odd reason, and wasn’t used very much.
Exactly
This is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 I found it on their website, but no manual.
On the hard drive is a diagram for Drive Jumper Settings. It has a setting for 1. Master ON Slave OFF 2. Cable Select (this is what it was set to) and 3. Limits drive capacity to 32 GBytes.
I tried Tom’s advice to hook it up w/o the jumper at all, and got the same results.
Yes, there is the IDE cable. It plugs into the motherboard, then has three other connectors: the top one goes to the DVD/CD drive, the bottom goes into the hard drive, and the middle one is empty, which is where I was connecting my old drive.
So, at this point I’ve tried it with the jumper set to cable select, and to nothing; neither has allowed the computer to recognize my old files. (Aargh.)
BTW, the new hard drive is a Barracuda 7200.7, too. It says 160 GB on it, also. They seem to be the same drive.
Thanks for your help!
Uh, is there any chance that you encrypted the drive contents on the old system? That would explain why you can’t see your files. If this is the case: since it’s the original boot drive, I’d swap it out with the new drive and boot from it. Then use the Windows Explorer to decrypt the contents; you should then be able to install it as a slave again and get to your files.
No, I haven’t encrypted it, but if I may repeat myself: I really, really, really hope I can boot from it. I’d probably use the other (a third…the one this came from is fried) to do this. If that works, I’ll just use my portable hard drive to back up My Documents and away I’ll go.
Oh, and I’m just KICKING myself for not backing up up this week. I meant to EVERY day and never got around to it. I have a LOT backed up, but it’s been a month since the last backup, and I take a lot of pics and download a lot of music. Aargh.
Lesson learned? Probably not
Seagate Barracude 7200.7 Manual .pdf (Jumpers on 29 of 52)
Chances are, you will not be able to boot from the old drive, unless most of the componenents in the new computer are the same as those from the old computer. You will end up crashing the system, because none of the drivers will be correct for your hardware. Now, Windows is a lot better about fixing massive hardware changes, but it’s still not a great thing to do. You said the old computer ‘fried.’ Any chance there was damage to the HD?
It sounds like what your are seeing on the old drive is the recovery partition, not a folder. Compaq drives came with two partitions, one for the OS, applications and data, and one with a disk image to restore from is the first became corrupted. So if it is seeing the recovery partition, I don’t think it is the cables or the jumpers. I think your main partition may be damaged and is no longer recognized by the new computer. Try running fdisk to look at the partitions to see if the main one is listed as “unrecognized”. This would be an indication that it is damaged and cannot be read by the new computer.
friend brian axe
i had a similar problem. i attempted to get a hard drive from a broken computer to boot into another with no luck. the solution i found was to buy a usb external hard drive enclosure, install my hard drive into it and plug it into the usb port on my new computer. i did not try to boot from this, but i was able to recover my data files, music, pictures ect. widows xp pro reads this 60 gig hard drive the same way it reads a thumb drive. the enclosure with cables cost 35 bucks at comp usa and it took me about twenty minutes to install the old drive into it.
It sounds kinda sorta like someone was possibly using a disk compression utility to maximize drive space. Also, if IIRC Microsoft offered a built in compression option on Win 98 and maybe ME) If you take a “compressed” drive out of an older system and plug it into newer one with one compressed partition and one not (the small recovery partition), you will be seeing exactly what you are seeing now (ie nothing but the recovery partition) because the utility needed to see the compressed section needs to be loaded at boot up.
DO NOT set this older drive as the master and try to boot the new system with it. Windows will start trying to weave the new hardware into the old OS registry and may well overwrite key files necessary for the drive to work properly in the older configuration.
Get the closest older PC you can find, boot the system with the older drive and use a thumb drive (if old system has USB) or floppies etc to pull off your data.
I forgot to mention that instead of compression it might also be a BIOS ultility like Seagates Smartdrive or similar that allows install of larger capacity drives that the MB BIOS can normally handle (Compaq BIOSes were notoriously primitive re drive size handling). If this is the case you have the exact same scenarios as in my previous post in that you need to boot with the affected drive (so the BIOS translation utility can be loaded) in order to see the drive partitions.
I tried to launch my computer at work with the old hard drive (they were basically the same computer).
That didn’t work, so I just installed it into the work computer as an extra hard drive.
It recognized it…and let me see everything except (wait for it)…
My Documents. I’m guessing it’s because I have it password protected (just the usual Windows security password).
Any ideas on how to get around that?
Also, if I could get that old computer to boot, maybe I could have it run long enough to copy my files.
Thanks again, everyone, for all your help and advice!
I was going to guess compression or drive-overlay issues myself, but since you’ve got it working, forget that.
The “password protection” on the My Documents directory is just some extra information in the access control list, which AFAIK is not possible to remove under Windows.
The easiest way to get the files you want is to boot your PC using some live Linux distro like Ubuntu or Knoppix, mount the drive, and transfer the files off to another harddrive, or another PC over the network.
I expect you might not find this quite so easy though. 
Assuming you can’t find someone familiar with Linux to help:
Here’s a guide where the guy uses Ubuntu, and shares out the files he wants to the network. You could also copy files to another HD in the same machine.
Here’s another guide specifically for Knoppix.
This sounds great…but is Knoppix going to be able to see My Documents, even though it is password protected when trying to view with Windows?
Thanks!
I’d say so. AFAIK the files aren’t encrypted or anything, and Linux NTFS filesystem support doesn’t care about user restrictions. (Can’t even write to NTFS actually).
All you have to lose is a CDR and the time it takes you to download the .iso, burn the image, and shove it in the PC and wait for it to boot.
