Hard Disk Recovery

I would like to recover the contents of a Hard Disk of an old PC of mine that crashed and could not be resusitated. My thought is to install it as a second HD on another PC with Windows XP as an operating system. What are the watchouts on this. Jumper settings are a mystery to me.. The HD in question is a Western Digital Caviar 33100. My current computer is a Gateway 550 desktop.

 

This should be a fairly simple process

- shutdown new computer
- Remove drive from old computer
- Set jumpers to slave (there should be a map on the drive to tell you how the jumpers should be set)
- attach the drive to the free connecter on the same ribbon cable as the master in the new computer
- attach the power to the drive
- boot the computer
- XP should see it just fine
(Note: this might reletter a cd or dvd drive)

 

I also have a HDD to recover data from but in my case the controller won't recognize the disk but sporadically now.

The drive was less than a week old and I've tried all the things you can imagine including cleaning the pins, other cables, trying other drives (which worked fine on the same cable) etc etc etc

It seems the data is on the drive but the drive only intermittently communicates with the controller. The inenr mechanics would seem to be fine. Maybe there's a break in contact to the pins. Maybe the electronics are shot. I don't know.

The drive is unimportant but I want the data off. Being only 2 days since I installed it I hadn't gotten more than 10% backed up yet to CDs. Please advise!

 

Hi Stelliger ...

See my response to your other post.