thanks Dell! hard drive help needed

W

wiseguymmiv

New Member
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? :confused:
 
What is the error that appears when trying to access the drive? Im wondering if hooking it up as a internal slave in another desktop might work. Iv never tried an external Drive to recover with, but i know anytime iv recovered with an internal slave it has seemed to work. However the times when the drive is compleatly gone, iv found the software
Get Data Back for NTFS (or Fat32) has worked wonders for me.
 
fahmi1,

When I hook up the first HD to my laptop via USB to IDE cable, I get the "device connection" sound, followed by autoplay which seems to be scanning the HD. When I click on the HD, then Documents and Settings, I see several folders. One folder is my user name from my desktop. When I click on that folder, where all my stuff is stored, it says that the Documents and Settings folder "is not accessible. Access is denied." I can open and browse all the other folders, just not the one with my username on it. Your thoughts?

Another question: If I find a desktop PC to hook my HD to as a slave, does it matter what type of PC I use? Say, a different model Dell desktop? A compaq PC? Also, would I need to be running XP on the working desktop to be able to access my old HDs, since they were set up with XP? Would Windows 2000 work?

Thanks for the advice. I may have to buy the software you mentioned to get back my data, but I gotta do what I gotta do.

Thanks!
 
Does your laptop BIOS have a boot option to boot into a USB external drive. If it does then try booting into the USB external drive.
 
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