Hard Disks, XP, IDE and low level control

[Ohio guy]

I lost a 60 month old hard drive with valuable data. Dell sent a free replacement, which I installed and brought up as main drive. Diagnostics of trouble made me think it was old drive's on-board IDE controller board not disk or head. SO I bought a new one just like it ( Western Digital WD600BB), swapped those boards. Tantalizing results. New drive all OK; new drive is no-op with old board (as hoped/expected); XP device manager says old drive with new board is working OK. But I can't mount that old drive with the new board and use it. Seems like XP can tell difference between the old (bootable) and new (empty secondary) WD600 disks, and won't let me use that old bootable one. I suspect XP is thwarting piracy of the OS, but me, I just want those CAD files off that drive. I carefully compared the IDs on controller cards - same part number and same rev level. Any thoughts how i can test that old drive with new board without the OS inbterfering, and how I can get my data off it?

 

[Rick]

But I can't mount that old drive with the new board and use it

Could you elaborate what exactly it is doing? What kind of error message is displayed? Is there any?