wiseguymmiv

Hi,

My Dell Desktop motherboard died recently, so Dell sold me another one, albeit one for a slightly different Dell model (they no longer make the motherboard for my model desktop). When I installed the new MB, the PC wouldn't boot. Dell determined that the new motherboard was the issue and my 2 hard drives need to be reformatted and windows XP reinstalled. The Problem?

I have lots of data (pix, word files, music, etc.) on the hard drives. Nothing was deleted, etc. It should still be sitting right on my hard drives. I bought a USB to IDE cable with its own HD power supply thinking I could easily copy the files from my HDs onto my laptop...no such luck. My master HD will read, but denies me access to the files and documents under my username. I CAN view the contents of the windows folder, programs folder, etc. I may have been using a password to log onto windows before the old MB died. Could this be the issue? If so, what to do?

The second HD, the slave, is recognized by my laptop via the USB to IDE cable, makes the "device found" sound, but then makes the "device disconnected" sound. I have not been able to see the contents of the slave HD on my laptop. The master HD is found as new hardware each time I plug it in...the slave HDis never found, it just makes the device connection and disconnection sounds when connected. What's the deal?

Is there some other way to get the data from these HDs? I didn't think I needed data recovery software in my situation, but maybe I was wrong. Any thoughts?