Slave disk drive recovery??

[Yobbo]

My wifes XP computer died a few weeks back, so I built her another one, all good.

I took the slave drive out of her old XP computer WD200g and tried to put it with the data still on it, in her new Vista machine as the slave drive, although it shows in the bios as being there it does not show in "computer"

I then took the slave drive out of my XP PC and replaced it with the Wifes slave drive, again it shows in the bios but not in "my computer" the WD software from there website finds it but all it wants to do is reformat it. I need to recover the data from it first as it has all our 2yo photos and video on it,

I downloaded a trial software for data recovery and it finds all the files on the drive,

Before I buy this software, is there anything I can do to make windows see the drive? is there any software out there that is free that I can use to recover the files??


Thanks Yobbo

[ATTITUDE]

just buy a ide/sata to usb device problem solved

[Yobbo]

Thanks Kevs, very good idea, just brought one on ebay for $7 I will let you know how it goes, thanks again

[glenndonna]

Kevs, I have the same prob with my 80gb external hd,,it just wants to format,,I have many years of Family photos,,wife doesnt no,,dead meat.
what is ide/sata ??
Glenn

[ATTITUDE]

Ide or sata cable from hard drive that you want to get your photo off and plug the other end of cable to usb on another pc and just go to my computer and you should see another drive sitting there just open and copy the data off it. google it you will see.o also dont going buying one that comes in a blue box (not sure of the make now) had 2 and both power supplys stuffed up so i changed to this one. (Midte USB 2.0 to SATA / IDE Adaptor Cable) works great.

[z80]

I would google "free data recovery software".

Sounds like your partition table has been hit with a virus..

Norton utilities will fix it as well.

[Yobbo]

well my IDE / USB cable arrived, very useful tool, I had to use GetDataBack which someone suggested in another post about data recovery, and all good, I was able to get the files off the hard drive, reformat it and reinstall it back into the pc. that GetDataBack program was very easy to use,

thanks to all who helped

[Philquad]

very good
i use power data recovery, hacked version of course
dont use on your main drive but great for slave drives
it pays to have 2 hdds in a conputer
mainly becoz theres hell of a lot less chance that the drive without windows on it, wont crash...

[jamesv]

very good
i use power data recovery, hacked version of course
dont use on your main drive but great for slave drives
it pays to have 2 hdds in a conputer
mainly becoz theres hell of a lot less chance that the drive without windows on it, wont crash...

Yea Phil, especially one with windows vista on it. Had nothing but problems with my 2 week old ASUS laptop. Had to recover c drive once. lost emails in Windows Mail and spent hours and hours getting software for older external hardware to work....