Recently my hard drive crashed and i was wondering if there'd be any way to make it a slave drive so i could retrieve files from it. When i do this will it show up in my computer as drive E: or how does it work exactly? Also I have already tried setting it up as a slave drive and it's not being read. When hitting F2 before windows loads and looking at the bios it doesn't show it in there either. Right now i've got a temporary hard drive that used to have win 3.1 which i formatted and put win 98se on it. this hard drive only holds 400 and some odd number of mb which is hard to anything with since about 2 programs take up about all of it. Also I'm having a hard time getting the sound to work on it (take a look at compter crashed for that side of the story. all i really wanna do is to get the sound working on here which i can't get grrrrr. So any help on making the crashed hard drive a slave drive I'd be happy to recieve some help. Thanks

Have you sorted out the jumpers on the HardDrive itself?

If it dosn't show up then maybe the Hard Drive is Buggered? Or try Swapping the Flex Cable the other way round, Dunno why but it works for me sometimes when My hard Drive didnt show up when i first built it.

That depends on how it crashed. If it suddenly became non-responsive then its likely the electronics have failed and the drive is history. If you were able to boot but you got errors or intermittent problems then you may have a chance of extracting data from the drive.

The first step is to get it recognised in the BIOS. If you can't get that to happen then the drive is useless. Jumper settings and cable combinations are difficult to describe, so the simplest way to add your old drive to the system, without changing jumpers, is to connect it to the 2nd IDE channel. The motherboard will (normally) have two IDE connectors. Usually one is connected by a ribbon cable to the hard drive and the other by a second ribbon cable to the CDROM drive. If that is the case just unplug the CDROM drive and plug in your old hard drive in its place - it should then be detected in the BIOS (change the settings to AUTO if necessary).
If both hard drive and CDROM drive are on the same cable then you will need a second IDE cable to connect your old hard drive to the 2nd IDE connector.

If you can't get the drive connected because you don't have access to another IDE cable then you wil have to change the jumper settings. You need the jumper settings for both hard drives and you need to identify your IDE cable as 40 wire or 80 wire (Normally the 80 wire has different coloured connectors). If you have a 40 wire connector you must use the Master/Slave settings. If you have an 80 wire cable you can use either Cable Select settings on both drives, or the Master/Slave settings.

Logical drive letters:
The first recognisable partition on the first hard drive in the case is referred to by Windows as "C:" (or Local Drive C) because the letters A: and B: are reserved for floppy drives. If there is a second partition, on the same hard drive that will be referred to as "D:" (local Drive D) and so on. When all the partitions on all the hard drives have been allocated a drive letter Windows will then allocate letters for other IDE devices such as CDROM drives.
In the most simple setup there is only one partition on your hard drive, which is therefore C:, and one CDROM drive, which is therefore D:.

hth

Dear Fire,

Wow nice post Rimmer and he is exactly right. If you are desperate for the information on your crashed hard drive there are ways to retrieve the information.

It costs plenty! You can take or send your hard drive to a repair facility to retrieve any data they can. They will not retrieve any classified data.

The price will meet or exceed a new hard drive price though.

Let us know,

junkdk

Dear fire,

I just read a post that may help you for nothing.

Ultimateboot CD 4 Windows has many tools that may recover all your data, and they are all freeware. All you need is a PC and your Winxp CD and SP1/SP2 if it's not already integrated, full details on the site.

If your going to plug the hdd into another PC have a look here for freeware file recovery tools.

If you need to access a bad drive, put the hdd in a plastic bag squeeze out all the air and put it in the freezer for a couple of hours. This may not fix your problem but it's worth a shot if you can't get it to work.

Got a cooling fan for the hdd something like this, if you've not got one and even if you have got a house fan and point it at the drive. Heat is the biggest cause of hdd failure, whilst attempting recover you need to keep it cold for as long as possible, once it's warm it's likely to go again and you may not get it back. So when you plug it in make sure your ready to go. Get familiar with the tools before you use them so you know what you are going to do.

Cheap file recovery software look at the following

R-Tools
O&O Disk Recovery
Active File Recovery

You can thank stidyup for this.

Wow...I am impressed and rarely I am.

junkdk

thanks for all the replies, however i can't do anything with them yet because, well, my other hard drive also crashed because of a stupid mistake (had the computer open on it's side and tried to set it up right and close it and poof there it went). i'll just have to have some patience until i get a new hard drive goin. this time it was like rimmer said it just stopped so i'm sure that that hard drive is toast. the first one however can start loading up and says there was an error in line 25 or something like that. so i'm sure that one will be able to work, unless i'd be able to find the file it can't find and add it in there some where to get it goin?

That's bad luck!

Come back to us with details when you're ready to continue.