Primary Drive Not recognized

R

renaissanceman

New Member
My old beater computer has decided to not recognize my hard drive anymore. I have some files that are very important I need to recover. Is there a method to do this with my other desktop computer? Any suggestions?
 
Put the drive in your other computer and see if it recognizes it. Your drive may have just died on you. If its an IDE drive make sure you set the jumpers correctly according to the original drive settings.
 
I pulled the drive out and put it as slave in another computer. I made a mistake and did not put the middle connector of the ribbon on the slave at first, so my computer did the same as the other, no drive found. I switched the plugs around and now it boots and I can access the old drive. I am having difficulty finding where my emails have been saved. I was using outlook express on the old unit, but when I open that utility, the special folder I created is not there, only the original folders (inbox, drafts, etc.) are present. Any ideas why this would be the case?? I think what is actually happening is is opening outlook express on the primary drive, not what is on the slave drive...
 
That is exactly whats its doing. Your old outlook express email is actually saved in its default folder.

c:\documents and settings\"your own user name"\local settings\application data\identities\"series of letters and numbers"\microsoft\outlook express


Where C is the drive letter of your old hard drive.
You need to make sure that hidden files and folders are enabled so that you can see the local settings folder and beyond.

Then you can transfer all those .dbx files into the new hard drive. Follow the same file directory to transfer them to the new drive.
 
OK, I have figured how to copy it to the new hard drive, but I don't want to REPLACE the existing files on the new hard drive, which is what it is asking me to do. I just want to ADD them to the existing file. What to do, what to do?? By the way, thanks for the help...
 
You can't just add them. They have to be replaced. The only other way to add them to the existing is to email them to yourself from the old install to the new install, providing you can boot back into the old install.
 
OK, I've resent all the emails that I needed to keep from the new computer and cleared the folder so I could copy from the old drive to the new, which I have done via the prior method described. Or so I thought. When I tried to open these email files with Outlook Express, they weren't there. Bummer, and back to the forum. What I did was copy the outlook express folder from hard drive "f" to the outlook express folder from the same location in "c". It asked if I wanted to overwrite, and I said yes. Where did they go???
 
Maybe this is the problem: I moved the outlook express folder instead of each file (Inbox, outbox, etc) one at a time...I am going to send the folder back and then move each file separately...
 
Nope, that didn't work. For some reason, my transferred emails are not being accessed by outlook express...any ideas how to proceed from here??
 
In order to add the emails in those files to your existing setup, you will have to boot back into the original install and actually use your email program and forward them to yourself. Or you can try exporting them and then importing them into the new install. If you don't know what you are doing, you might have to take in to the shop and have them do it.
 
You would need to disconnect the new drive and just leave the old drive connected then it should automatically boot back into that drive providing you set the jumper to master.
 
Yep, or you could access the bios and set which one you want to boot from, but it might be easier to just disconnect the other one.
 
Now I've done it!! Screwed up, that is. I took the "slave" drive out of the working computer and put it back in the old computer to check something, which of course proved fruitless, so I then reurned it to the new computer, but now it won't boot either. I get a check for virus, check hard drive for config and term errors, and run chkdsk/f to look for corruption. Starts fine if I remove slave drive. Any idea how to get things at least to where I was before my experiment in stupidity/futility?
 
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