So my Windows 98SE machine bit the bit bucket last week and I went and bought a new machine. It is an HP Pavilion with Windows XP on it. I didn’t want to lose the data from my old machine, so I intended to take the hard drive from my old machine and put it in as the slave drive on the new machine. Something isn’t working and I have no clue what.
I’ve configured the jumpers on the drives such that the new drive is the master and the old is the slave. The new drive still isn’t seen by the new machine. I’ve also configured the jumpers such that they are set to cable select. Again, still no dice.
The BIOS is for the second drive is set to “Auto”. I’ve run MaxBlaster (they are both maxtor drives) but that sees only the new drive.
The second drive gets power, as I can feel it vibrate slightly when the PC is booting and the drives are accessed.
The new drive is 60GB, and the old is 20GB, so I don’t think this has anything to do with the BIOS not being able to read large capacity drives.
The cable is clearly marked “MASTER” and “SLAVE” (and FDD) so I know I have that part correct. (The grey and the black give it away, too).
I’m pretty sure the old drive is a FAT32 drive. Does anyone know if that is causing any problems? Is there a way to recover that data? My next step will be to borrow a friend’s computer who has 98 on it and try my drive in there and then use a serial cable to transfer the data.
Tell me the part about the cable again. A standard IDE cable does not typically have any “master/ slave” markings or any markings other than a red stripe down one side. Maybe this is something new.
Try unplugging the CD Rom that is probably on the master position of the 2nd IDE channel and jumper the 2nd drive to “master” and plug it into that cable header and power connector and see if the system “sees” it.
Some drives (rarely) just don’t get along sharing the same cable. Make sure the red stripe is facing the side where the power connector polugs into the drive.
HPs usually have stuff like cables and connectors labled pretty clearly. At least, a lot of the HP machines I’ve opened do. It’s a nice touch, I think.
Are you certain the reason why the old machine bit the bucket wasn’t because the hard drive died?
I’ll second Astro’s suggestion of using the cdrom’s connector to see if it works.
Also, check to make sure that the power plug you’re using doesn’t also split off and supply power to the floppy drive or anything else. Sometimes if the drive doesn’t get enough juice at startup, it’ll just crap out and not be seen.
In the Bios, you have to clear NVRAM. This is a system memory of whats in the machine. So, if you
had just one drive in it, it thinks there is only one drive. You must clear it, then it looks for
new drives. Sometimes, its called something else than nvram, but try changing the Bios to default or safe
boot or whatever option is has in that area.
Thanks for all the suggestions. I haven’t tried to connect the drive to where the CD is connected, but I’ll give that a shot tonight.
As for what I have tried in the meantime:
I disconnected my hard drive completely and put the old drive in its place. I then inserted the Maxtor Maxblaster disk (downloadable from www.maxtor.com) in the floppy drive and rebooted. Maxblasters doesn’t see the old drive.
I went to a friend’s house and did the same things there that I did at home. Still not working. I think I’m screwed. I’m getting more and more convinced that whatever took out my old PC took the old drive with it. The really, really depressing part is that I don’t have floppy backups (my old PC didn’t have a CD RW, so I couldn’t backup to that). I did have two drives in the old system and critical information was stored on both drives. They are both dead.
Does anyone know of any places that will recover data from dead drives? If pressed, there really are just a few files that I’d really like to get back.
There are a lot of places that do it. Some might be in your area, or you might find one you’d rather send it to.
None of these places seem to want to post prices (probably because they work hourly) but I’d imagine it’s got to be sort of expensive since it’s not something any schmo can do. But they all seem pretty repuitable.
It does sound like the drive is what bit the dust. Forget getting an OS to recognize the drive, you need to have BIOS get its hands on it first.
It usually doesn’t matter how you have the hard drives set up, you just need to remember how you’ve set them up, and then make sure BIOS knows the same information you do. If you don’t know the heads/cylinders/other information that BIOS requires, you should be able to set it to “autodetect” the drive.
If BIOS knows it is (for example) the slave on the primary IDE cable, and is set to autodetect, and then still doesn’t find it, I’d say you are out of luck without trying much more esoteric means of recovering the data.
Also make sure you are reading the drive jumper diagram correctly. With some drives it’s easy to mis-understand the diagram and reverse the positions.
If you determine the electronics are shot, if you can get a exact duplicate model drive on Ebay (or wherever) and put the new controller board on, the chances are better than even that the drive will come back up unless the media (the platter surface) itself is damaged.
Urban Ranger I tried that… no luck. I tried it on a different PC. Still no luck.
handy I’ll check for that, but I don’t remember seeing such a thing in my bios. Thanks for the tip.
ZipperJJ I did as you suggested, and contacted a couple of companies. They want (minimum) $1,000 to recover the data. Unfortunately this idea didn’t really pan out.
erisloverI’ll try more games with the bios, but I did try to specify cylinders, heads, etc. but that didn’t work (something similar was documented on either maxtor or Wester Digital).
astro I’m going to have to give that one a shot. It sounds pretty reasonable, too. The only problem might be finding exact duplicate model drives. Do you really think it is 50/50? I’m willing to risk $40 on the first drive finding out if the chances are that good.