data on hard drive

My neighbor cannot access his hard drive, his old computer had a power supply surge up then die.

The hard drive did not fry but it cannot be accessed.

Anyone know how to be able to get his data off it?

Please don't talk about having backups of things as I think he knows pretty well that now.

Just need to access the drive.

I put it in my removable drive and tried every combination, slave, master, cable, and none work.

i'd try putting that hard drive in a similar computer. If its an old machine, you should be able to find one cheap......or one that is compatible with it.

May not be able to see the FAT table. Try booting into DOS to see files and use the COPY command. If it is old and you are running XP best do what Mike says.

George

Jon I had this problem recently. I just took it to my friends house and plugged it in with his exsisting hardrive. we scanned it for viruses first then backed up the data off of it.

You should be able to boot with yours. I noticed that you said you had a removeable hard drive, is that the only one or is there another internal drive? If you boot with yours you should be able to view that data and back it up unless of course that is what you are saying you've tried.

I have Win 98 2nd Edition.

He has XP or ME

I did put it in my computer, the removable drive is my back up so was easy to put his HD into it, my computer could not find his HD under any of the setups, Master, Slave, Cable and the other two formats.

In fact when I would boot up it could not find one of two CD drives I have, the removable and one CD are on one cable, so for whatever reason his HD is not found by my computer.

Very strange if you ask me.

One thing, when I put the jumper to slave and booted up it locked up my computer, all other settings it would boot up but not find his HD.

Hope this helps some.

Jon

Where is the removable drive connected to the computer? A port or on the IDE chain? Even better look to see who manufactures the HD and what model. If he has XP and setup the HD with the new file system (NTFS) only another XP machine will see the drive(there are no exceptions and no other way to see drive if that is the case).

George

George is right only an XP os can recognize an XP os. However XP can recognize earlier versions of windows also. This most likely is just an operating system clash since you are trying to view a late model os with your earlier model os.

My next suggestion of course would be to replace the power supply if thats all that is wrong with his machine. Then he can get back to business. The power supply is relativly easy to replace but it is VERY imperitive that he get one that is the same as the one that came out. There are different kinds of power supplies.

Jon, I have a related question. Are you using an external HD? If so, can it be set up as the master? I think I am beginning to have a problem with the HD in one of my computers. Thought about buying and external HD for backing up all of my computers. Then it occurred to me I may be able to use as the master on the problem computer. Your thoughts?

The HD is not external, it is a removable HD. He bought a new Dell Computer, when he installed this removable from his old computer to his new dell it would not recognize the HD, both have XP.

It is starting to look like if he wants that data bad enough he is going to have to pay some pretty big bucks for it.

Thanks for the help so far, if something works I shall post what was done to make it work.

Jon,
There are companies that specialize in data retrieval from toasted hard drives. It is fairly expensive, the last time I checked a couple years back, it was about $600.

Based on what you wrote, I'm not sure which direction to steer you in. I would need more info. However, it is true that a hard drive formatted with NT5 used in XP can not be read by a Win98 machine, which uses either FAT or FAT32 for it's file organization.

There are some third party software packages that may allow you to view the contents of a hard drive that has a different organization. I think the latest version of Partition Magic allows that, but, I've been out of the computer biz a year now, and haven't kept as close in touch as I should have.

Email me if I can help further....

apluspowerwashing@comcast.net

I know this posting is probably late but I just joined the forum. Maybe it could help someone else. The likely reason the drive could not be recognized by the computer and the CD drive disappeared is that you not only have to set the jumpers on the hard drive but you must also set the jumpers on any other device on the same IDE cable. This would also cause the computer to lock up under certain jumper configurations.

My neighbor did get the stuff off the hard drive, not sure how but he did quite some time ago but thanks all for the information.


Thanks all for your help.


Jon