SATA drives ... master and slave?

[mickeyg8]

Hi everyone. I have a SATA drive that has an OS on it (Vista), where I have forgotten the password. I have tried every recommended utility/trick, to no avail. So, I have installed a new SATA drive which has XP on it, and I want to be able to pull the info off of the old drive by connecting it to my cable, but not making it my master. The XP drive, which works perfectly fine, is the primary drive and loads up when the computer is turned on. However, after hooking up the old SATA drive, the OS on the other drive does not detect that it is hooked up (so, I can't pull info off of it and fix it where I can access it). Any recommendations? How can I get it to be detected by my OS as another drive, so that I can use Windows Explorer to access the files on it? I appreciate any help you are able to provide! Thanks in advance!

 

[cliffordcooley]

One of the points in the SATA specification was one drive with one cable. That eliminated the need for master and slave designations. Simple plug and play assuming the port is enabled in the BIOS.

Sounds to me you are confused and actually have IDE drives. Does your data cable have two data connectors?

Anyway when working with two IDE drives on the same cable, the only way to connect a slave is to manually assign them both as the master or slave. That is unless you are using a "Cable Select" cable. Cable select is market on the connectors which one is which. Otherwise it doesn't matter which drive goes where. And jumpers on the drives will need to be set to assign which one is master and which one is slave.