'reading' BAD SATA

[Samdog]

My daughters hubby messed up the OS on his SATA WD HD.
REinstalling XP-Home won't work.
TOTALLY messed up.

Finally figured out how to get his HD out of his pooter and alongside my pooter case.

Was thinking of using mine [WD IDE] as MASTER and his EATA as slave so that I could pull off photos he desperately needs.

Once THAT is done his HD can be reformatted as the only thing of importance is his photos.

1. Does this scenerio seem possible ?
2. BIOS does not recognize the 'slave' SATA...!!

NOTE:
Have NO JUMPER in my WD HD as it shows I can have it set for MASTER/SLAVE ...WITH a jumper...
OR NO JUMPER and it automatically thinks itself der MASTER...
3. IS THIS RIGHT ?!?!

No amount of hair pulling will make the bios recognize the SATA ... as of now.

.....lost in space........

Samdog

 

[AlbertLionheart]

If your IDE is PATA on a ribbon cable and your s-o-l's hdd is SATA you should not need to change jumpers.
If the BIOS does not see the SATA drive, maybe you need to enable SATA?
Also bear in mind that even when you can see into the drive, if it's contents are password protected you will not be able to get at them.

 

[Cinders]

I wouldn't put his hard drive in your pooter. It could be messy and I imagine it would hurt.

1 Sure it's possible.
2 On his computer do you have to enter an Administrative password to enter the BIOS? If so then the drive is locked. To unlock the drive you have to reinstall the drive in his computer and remove any password(s) from the BIOS. Are you both running the same operating system? Does your computer have SATA ports? You can't run the SATA drive as a slave because a single SATA port only has one channel so the drive on that channel is always a master. An IDE port has two channels, so one drive is the master while the other is the salve. You are trying to transfer his disk to your computer right? Booting off of your disk in his computer will not work.

His drive isn't clicking is it? Because if it is it's broken and the pictures are gone! Gone, without expensive professional data recovery that is. If he lost the weddn' pitchers you might as well start kicking his tush right now.

 

[Samdog]

Have his SATA WD HD [250GB] sitting beside MY pooter... connected to my mobo.

On my BIOS:
SATA-RAID [?]....[2 places !! ??] turned ON as it was OFF before.... in BOTH places.
Still does not recognize the SATA drive.
Even moved the SATA cable to #2 plug on my mobo... no soap.

Tried moving MY [120GB] WD PATA [IDE] drive jumper from NONE to the middle where it says [MASTER w SLAVE attached].

With that jumper setting now MY HD is not recognized ?!?!

Sooo I took the jumper back OFF and now MY IDE WD HD is as it was with NO JUMPERS.
IT is recognized but not the SATA. back to square one.

MY OS is XP-PRO
His is XP-Home ~ but it is messed up and will not run nor reinstall no matter how many sumersaults I do. That is why I thought I could access his HD as a SLAVE to my pooter and take off his photos.

After that a good squeeky clean reformat is in order.

really appreciate the quick replys.
one is bound to hit on that elusive 'magic button'

Samdog

 

[AlbertLionheart]

My tuppenyworth is as follows:
This assumes you have the corrct windows CD and all the drivers to hand.
Refit the drive to s-i-l's machine. Reboot from the CD and at the first options page install windows. Follow the wizard until you get to the second options page and then select repair. Sit back. This should replace all the windows files and then reboot. If you are lucky all will be as it was before, if not give it a swift format up the jacksie and consider the wisdom of keeping a backup.
I can say this as I have been there before and I am supposed to make my living out of messing with these things.

 

[Samdog]

Yep... been dere dunn dat...

Done that before on other pooters.
AS you said..."If you are lucky."
Unfortunately 'luck' with the REPAIR bit,
usually is lacking, as it is here.

YEP again.... Don't know why his photos are ONLY on ONE HD and not even backed up on CD or another machine,,,, as this is for his 'shop', and the photos relate to ongoing one of a kind 'projects'.
go figger........

Well hopefully someone will have another bright idea and solve my dilemma.

samdog

 

[Cinders]

Well I've been thinking that maybe the SATA drive is SATA II while your controller card may be SATA I. If that is the case you may have to jumper the drive to run at SATAI for the controller card to recognize the drive.

 

[Samdog]

Didn't forget you guys.
I was waiting for further developmments.
Had found a guy to rip out the needed files off the HD [photos] 1.64 Gb worth...YIKES !!!
He said it mught need a week or so as his workload was full.
Overnight he found time.

So now I have the HD ready to reformat.

"Q"... the pooter is a GATEWAY.
The CD that came with it as the Gateway XP OS to install, says [on the face of the CD]...
.....'start' with the 'RED DRIVERS CD' before installing the XP home OS.

Well nuts, all I have is the XP CD. The 'RED DRIVERS CD' is lost out there in la-la land.
Dug into GATEWAYS website and started chasing my tail so I called them.
They said they couldn't help as they no longer use the 'RED DRIVER CD' the instructions referred to........... (

Soooo I asked if there was anything in the bios that would prevent me from installing XP OS NOT of their 'flavor'....

They didn't answer the question except to say..." go ahead... do it."

Not sure if I might not run into a can of worms.
Maybe the bios and original OS is 'married' ?!?!?!?!?!

What are YOUR thoughts before I go nuts, and dig a deep hole.
samdog

 

[Cinders]

You will be able to install an OEM copy of Windows XP on your pooter. In other words, You will be able to install any non-branded version of Windows XP on your computer. Now you should not be able to install the Gateway flavored XP on a different brand computer, but I have managed to install Windows XP on a home built computer using an OEM disk and a Dell serial number. If you don't have a OEM copy of XP then you might try to use a program named nlite to add the drivers to a copy of your install disk and remove the BIOS branding info if you wish. I'm not sure nlite works with branded disks.