Maxtor 300 GB re-install

[DreamSlave2112]

About five years ago, I ordered a 300 GB Maxtor Hard drive to supplement the factory 30 GB drive in my Presario. I hooked it up right and it worked well for about a year and then whenever I tried to acess it, Windows Explorer stopped respnding.
I was still, however, able to access that drive from a computer on the same network.
I decided that maybe the Maxtor had a virus or something on it, so I took out the controller card and removed the drive from the BIOS.
Well, I decided to try and re-activate it to just pull some stuff off it, run a virus scan on those files that I pull off and then be done with it, maybe try to wipe it and start fresh.
Problem is, I forgot how I installed it and lost the documentation and 3.5 floppy disk (boot disk, I guess) for it. I've gotten as far as putting the card back in and reconnecting the "ribbon wire", that wide collection of wires, looks like a strip of extra wide duct tape. (yeah, I'm a real techie).
The card has two slots on it, IDE 1 and IDE 2. Connecting the cable to either side has no effect on the computer. It still cannot find the drive; I can't even locate it in the BIOS.
So here are my questions?
How can I get it to work in my Compaq (Presario, PIII, 500 Mhz, 384 MB RAM, Win98), enough to pull what i want off it?
or:
How can I install it into my HP Pavilion 751N (P4, 1.8 Ghz, 256 MB RAM, Win XP SP2)?
I still have the CD that came with the drive (Max Blast Plus II).
Thanks for any help.

 

[PC eye]

If it's a standard ide hard drive, while 300gb sounds a little too large for 5yrs. ago, you could slave it in the present case and boot from something like Knoppix Live for cd or another live Linux distro burned to a bootable cd-r. The problem you face now is the fragmentation of the drive during that amount of time. Don't expect to recover too much there.

Once you have it slaved you could also try a data recovery or drive rescue tool. Knoppix and ubuntu live distros are the favorites since they can access drives with either Fat or NTFS type partitions. ReactOS is another free OS for recovery. If it tales a standard ribbon cable you can make the attempt or at least reformat the drive to be usable. It would to be an ATA100 capable drive for that to work at this time.