I had an old computer at work, and need to get the documents off the hard drive and move them to my new computer. The old hard drive is a Western Digital Caviar 35100, model AC35100, an old 5.1GB OEM drive with Windows 95 on it. I brought it home and hooked it up to my secondary computer (an HP a220n) as a slave. My home PC has a Samsung 120 GB drive, model SV1204H. There’s the facts…now the problem…
The old work computer suddenly stopped working after I disconnected it from power and monitor…when I hooked it back up, the monitor simply said “No Signal”. So I Figured I would install the old Western Digital HD in my home PC and burn the data onto a CD. I have tried to set the jumpers on both drives to cable select (the factory setting on my home PC), slave (on the old drive), and master (on the existing); no settting seems to work. With some jumper settings, the pc boots to WinXP and does not recognize the older drive; on some others, it says “primary secondary slave error”, even though, in the bios, it recognizes both drives…
Basically, what should the settings be? Does it sounds as though the old drive is fried? This is my first attempt at adding another drive to a PC, and I am lost…
Assuming your 120 gig hard drive and your CD drive(s) are on separate cables
1: Set the 120 gig hard drive back to it’s orignal setting and cable position
2: Set the old WD drive to stand alone or single -
3: Remove the second channel IDE cable attached to the CD drives or drives & put the old WD drive on the cable used by the CD drive - it should be the only device attached to this cable
4: Reboot & both drives should come up if property jumpered. Pull off the data
Power down -Detach the old drive then re-asemble your cable setup the was it was originally.
Also make sure you are reading the jumpers pins from the correct perspective relative to the jumper diagram on the Samsung or WD. One mistake people often make is to flip the drive when looking at the actual pins and they are then implementing the jumper settings backwards.
On the few attempts I can actually get the PC to boot to XP and I view the contents of “My Computer,” the only drives I see are the ones that came with the factory PC- C: D: (partitioned Backup/Recovery), E: & F: (cd-rom and dvd-rom), G: H: I: & J: (four memory card readers), and that is it.
I am going to try astro’s suggestion to hook it up to one of the optical drives cables and see if that works. Thanks for the suggestions so far!
Right-click on My Computer and select Manage. Select Disk Management. It should pop up a wizard, tell it to initialize but not convert the drive. Then look at the Disk Management right pane, find the drive, and right-click on it. Select “Change drive letter…” and add an available drive letter to the drive. You’ll then be able to see it in My Computer.
On a final old school note if the drive was originally installed on a old system with a MB BIOS that couldn’t handle partitions above 2 gigs, sometimes the install software for the drive would install a software based BIOS boot loader into the boot section of the drive that would implemented prior to DOS/WIN booting and allow an old MB BIOS to work with 2+ gig drives.
In some cases if you try to read these drives without loading the BIOS translation software they will appear corrupted or inaccessible to many systems.
If that’s the case getting an old win95 box from a thrift store for $10 and installing the drive as the boot master or so might be your best bet to get the drive back up and readable.
