Second CD-ROM drive not recognized

[bdruff]

2 related problems:

I have a laptop that died. I took out the hard drive to try and save the files. I purchased an adapter from a computer shop that allows me to connect to an IDE cable on a pc. I was told that I could just unplug one of the disk drives and connect my hd.

I have an old dell dimension 4550 that I dont use anymore. It has 2 cd-rom drives. I opened it up and unplugged 1 of the drives and plugged in my hd. I rebooted and got an error: "secondary hard disk drive 1 not found"

F1 to continue
F2 to go to set up

I went to setup and tried several times to get it to read my hard drive but could not. There are only 2 options for the settings, Auto and off. If I set it to auto I get the same message every time "secondary hard disk drive 1 not found"

primary hard disk 0......hard drive
primary hard disk 1.....off
secondary hard disk 0.....cd-rom reader
secondary hard disk 1.....unknown device

The 2 disk drives were on the same cable. The master connector works but the slave does not. If I plug the master connector into the other disk drive, it works.

Could my slave connection be bad on the ide cable?

What should my settings be?

both jumpers are set to cable select.

I want to recover the files on my old hard drive but first I want to fix this problem.

thanks

 

[Inforanop]

Try the jumpers set to master and slave - I always found cable select pretty useless.
Check for badly twisted cables too.

You could also connect the HD to the second primary channel on the motherboard,maybe ? Set the jumper to slave.

If you can`t get that to work,buy a USB/IDE 2.5 adapter (cheap) and connect it externally to a USB port.
That should have been your preferred solution..hee hee.