Re: How to use a corrupted hard drive as an external hard drive
- From: Paul <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 15 May 2009 17:12:50 -0400
lbdywrkr wrote:
Hello,
I was told by Microsoft Technical support (regarding a corrupted hard drive I have)
that I could go to a friends computer and hook up the corrupted drive as an external hard drive and be able to have access to the files stored on the drive that way.
I have two questions. 1) How is it that the information will be available using it as an external hard drive when it is corrupted and unavailable to me as a boot drive? 2) When using this drive as an external hard drive, how do I hook it up? Does it go on the same interface cable as my new hardrive? Like a slave? Do I just attach it and boot the computer like normal?
The tech support guy just told me I could do it, he didn't tell me how to to do it.
Running Windows Xp Home Edition SP3 with new Seagate 250 GB Pata/100 and Western Digital 120 GB as the corrupted drive.
I would love to be able to have access to the files on the corrupted drive and if possible use that drive for storage and to back up files.
Is this possible? And how do I do it?
Thank you in advance for any guidance you can give me as I am technically challenged and attaching all the cables correctly is a challenge.
My apologies if I have posted this in the wrong place.
When a drive is being used for booting, if any of the files critical to booting
are missing or damaged, you won't be able to boot.
If instead, you take the hard drive to another computer, and connect it as a
"data" drive, the "good" boot drive on that computer, takes care of the booting
part. Then, you can look at the bad drive, as a "data" drive if you want.
That would allow you to copy off important files, or use recovery or repair
utilities.
My personal preference for drive recovery, is to connect the drive to an internal
cable in the good working computer. That way, there is no USB interface to
complicate matters. For example, you can connect the drive to an internal
connector (either a ribbon cable connector, or a thin SATA cable). Then,
when the computer starts, enter the BIOS on the "good" computer, and you
should see the identity string in the BIOS screen. If the bad drive is not being
detected, then you would know there are serious issues with the bad drive
(issues requiring physical data recovery).
If you use a USB enclosure, and the drive refuses to respond, then looking
at the available info in Device Manager, may be less conclusive about the
total failure of the drive. I like the BIOS level test instead.
If you want another test environment, you don't have to move anything from
its current location inside the computer. You can use a Linux LiveCD to boot
the computer, in place of booting from your bad hard drive. Some Linux
environments include a copy of "testdisk", for partition repair if it is
needed (that is where the partition table, doesn't match the partitions
as they exist on the disk). Recent versions of Linux are also able to
mount FAT32 or NTFS volumes read/write, so you can copy data, make repairs
to OS files or whatever. I use a Knoppix Linux LiveCD for doing maintenance
on my WinXP disk.
OK, looking at your description, you say you have
1) Windows Xp Home Edition SP3 on a new Seagate 250 GB Pata/100
So, you're claiming you're able to boot from this drive, and the
drive works OK ?
2) Western Digital 120 GB as the corrupted drive
When booted from (1), is this drive visible in the file system ?
Can you see the WD disk listed in the BIOS screens for internal disks ?
If the drive is completely unresponsive, you may be able to get enough
information from your computer as it currently stands. If the WD 120GB
is not appearing in the BIOS, it could already be dead. You can try
moving it to another computer, but I wouldn't expect the symptoms to be
any different. After all, you're claiming (1) to be booting from a
good disk, and that would be no different from using some other
computer with a (1) "good disk".
Moving the disk to another computer, would be appropriate if you had
absolutely nothing to boot from. But since you have (1), there is no
point involving another computer in the recovery. With (1), you should
be able to observe and work on (2).
In summary, your next test, is to enter the BIOS, and see if both disks
are identified in the BIOS.
You can see in this BIOS screen, two hardware devices have responded.
One has a hardware ID of "IOMEGA ZIP 250", the other is more non-descript.
Your hard drive should be able to provide its hardware ID, and should
mention Western Digital or WD etc. That is the first step to working
on a drive - proving it is still responsive enough, to identify itself.
http://www.tritech.co.uk/support/kb/seaking/img/seanet-scu-bios-cmos-setup-screen.jpg
Paul
.
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- From: lbdywrkr
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