I got my computer back from the shop. (Thanks, everyone, for the advice; I just couldn’t get it to work.) I’m starting the arduous task of recovering data. To recap: Windows was crashing when I tried to open a Word document. My CD-drive also was not being detected. Since I have a lot of important documents on the original drive, I decided to install a new hard drive instead of reformatting the old one. As I said, I’ve had Win98 installed on the new drive. I’ve also gotten a CR-RW so I can back stuff up.
I put the old hard drive into the external drive case. The jumpers are set to ‘slave’. I hooked the external drive (with the original drive replacing the drive it came with) to the computer with a USB cord. The computer detected a new device and looked for a driver for it.
It didn’t find one. Can’t get to my files.
How do I retrieve my data from the external drive?
I’m on a 500mHz Pentium running Win98. (Yes, yes; I know. But I’m turning toward Macs now, and the obsolete PC has done what I’ve needed it to as it is – or was, anyway.) The external drive, which is now the hard drive of the computer is a Maxtor. It was bought as a Personal Storage 3100, and now has the old drive Gateway put in.
Well, first off, I’d try not setting the jumpers to “slave.” It’s the master drive for that IDE channel. So that could conceivably be causing a problem.
galt is dead right. An IDE drive connected to a USB bridge must be configured as Master (Certain USBtoIDE bridge chips support multiple drives and, in theory, CableSelect, but let’s not go there right now).
I set it back to Master, but it’s still no-go. Instead of detecting ‘USB Device’, it detected ‘Maxtor Personal Storage 3100’. That’s a step in the right direction, but it still wants a driver.
Does your computer case only have room for one IDE device? It might be the external drive setup that’s screwing you up. Why not install the old hard drive as the second drive internally?
Thanks for the link. I didn’t find it when I looked on the Maxtor site before. I tried a 3000 driver, but got an error when I clicked on the download link. Thanks to the link you provided, the driver is downloading now. (23 minutes to go…)
:smack: You said upfront you were running Win98. Of course you needed a driver for a USB storage device. XP made me lazy. Yeah, that’s it; blame Microsoft. It was Bill Gates’ fault, I swear.
I got the driver from the previous link. Good news is that it installed. Bad news is that the external drive does not show up on Windows Explorer. I got an e-mail from Gateway after I reported the problem:
I’d already told them that the device does not exist in WE.
Does the drive show up in the device manager? I’m desperately trying to remember my Win98 but I know that in Win2000 you sometimes have to go into the disk management tool and “import” the USB drive before Windows will assign it a drive letter and make it visible.
If it shows in the device manager check all the little tabs and properties screens, see if there’s one to assign it a drive letter.
Not specifically. That is, there’s nothing that says, ‘This is a removable hard disc.’ Just what I posted above.
I also found ‘Storage device’ in the disc manager, with no driver. (It says
No driver files are required or have been loaded for this device.) I don’t know if that’s the external drive, or if the other one is.
I checked the two possible options, and there is nowhere to enter a drive letter. I think it’s supposed to be assigned automatically.
If the external drive is USB 2.0 and my computer is USB 1.0, then is my only option to install the old drive in the extra HD slot? As I’ve said, I’m fairly rigorous in my anti-virus routine. But somehow, Windows wasn’t working properly. I suppose it could be that after 5½ years of constant use, the programme ran into itself or another programme and became corrupted; but I’m leery about putting in a ‘permanent’ HD that might be infected even though different virus scans turn up nothing. If I do install it as a D: drive (or E:, since the CD-RW is D: – unless that changes when another HD is put in), I don’t want any potential problems to jump the fence to C:.
A USB 2.0 drive should be completely backwards compatible with a USB 1.0 controller. That’s part of the standard.
Also, if you’re worried about stuff “jumping the fence” from the D: drive to the C: drive, you have exactly the same risk whether the drive is in an external case or not. It’s no worse to actually have the drive attached directly to the motherboard. I wouldn’t worry too much about this. Don’t run executables from the old drive; just get your data files and then format it if you still want to use it.
Don’t forget to dig through your old user profile directory and scrounge up all your favorites, and things that are sitting on your old desktop. They’re easy to overlook.
