Rescuing HDD content

L

LaSarthe&Back

New Member
Hi everyone, a newbie here, been browsing the site (very nice btw!) for a while now, and I'd like to pick your brains for some advice.

A while back, my 20GB seagate U6 ST320410A hard drive failed, so I got a 200GB to replace it, hoping to install windows and set the old drive to a slave, and rescue the files (photographs mainly) from it. It didn't want to know, saying "This drive is not formatted, would you like to format it now?" Of course I said no. So I gave up on it, and kept the old drive in storage.

Then later, my 200GB Barracuda failed, on startup, it said HDD read error, please restart and try again. Not sure if the two failures are related, but anyway.

I now have a new system, built myself, and is running fine. I am now backing up all the photographs and other stuff regularly. I dug an old 300MHz machine out of the loft, and plugged the 20GB as a slave, and it let me look at and copy the files I wanted from that drive to the machine's 3.2GB HDD. I then swapped this to my new machine and copied them over. GREAT!! :D Tried the same with the 200GB, and it wasn't even visible, but it appeared in the BIOS?? :confused:

My question is, can I override the OS when it tells me that it isn't formatted and get the content off that way?

I seem to remember vaguely that you need to enable support for drives over a certain size, but if I can do this on the old machine, I don't know.

Any help is greatly appreciated, as now I've got some content, I'm really on a mission to get it all!!

Thanks in advance, and sorry for the long post. :)

Cheers
Andy
 
You cannot override it... go to the add hardware wixard and look for it, or else look for a found new hardware on startup. make sure your mobo can support that hdd (ata66 mobo with a ata133 hdd)
 
Thanks for replying.

Is it a case of the mobo will or will not support that drive? i.e. it cannot be made to support it? I've tried it in two different machines, the new one ays it's not formatted, and the old one can't see it at all but does in te BIOS.

Is there something I can do in the BIOS to help?

Cheers
 
You've got a couple problems. The drive is more than likely too big for the older board and it was probably formatted in NTFS which cannot be read by windows 9x. The only way you might be able to get something off it if the new board says it's not formatted is with some file recovery tools but there's no gurantee that they will be able to get anything off of it.
 
Using Easy Recovery Pro, I've got 95% of it back! So pleased it's not all down the pan, and that I don't have to pay anybody to recover it for me!!

Cheers everyone for advice and best strategy.

Thanks again
Andy
 
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