Trying to recover data from old hard drive

BrunoM

Hi all,

My CD-Rom drive works fine; so I switch off, unplug the CD-Rom, and plug the old hdd into the same (IDE cable and power) plugs as the CD-Rom had been using.
In the BIOS, it does mention the existence of this hdd... but once I'm booted up in Windows, it's not showing at all.

Any suggestions on this issue? I was afraid the old drive might be completely defunct, but it's clearly getting power, spinning, and being correctly identified in BIOS. What am I missing?

(I really don't know a lot about this stuff - just enough to be dangerous)

Thanks!

dickibobboy

Start - Run - type 'compmgmt.msc' then okay.. THen in the console that opens up. Go to storage and discmanagement
Hopefully you should see the old hd there. Right click it and assign it a drive letter. If you have any problems post back

Chippy_Minton

Is the drive formatted and does it have data that you want to keep?

Right-click My Computer - Manage - Disk Management. Does it show there?

BrunoM

Thanks for the help guys - no, it's not showing in there

There are actually 2 hdds both of which have data I'd like to recover, neither of which I care about otherwise. Both of them seeeemed to show up in BIOS to my uneducated eye.

For what it's worth, one was a WinXP installation originally, the other may've been Win2000 or WinXP; both are quite old but not ancient, 80gb+200gb and certainly from this millenium!

Should I worry about where the jumpers are?

dickibobboy

on the IDE cables. There should be two ports on them and two cables from the motherboard.

IDE1 should be connected to your main hd. Then the other ide connection on the same cable should then go into the new harddrive. On the old harddrive set the jumpers to slave and then turn on the pc.