Okay, so I built a new PC recently because the HDD in my old PC went bad (yeah, yeah I know thats not a reason to build a whole new PC but don't tell my wife that!)and by bad i mean just wouldn't start up into windows any longer. It would boot up then go to the title screen then go blank and reboot. I was told it was an HDD problem so I just built a new PC. Now heres the kicker, I kept the HDD from the old PC as I was told all my files (photos, music etc) would still be on there and I should be able to get them off without to much trouble. I bought a HDD rack (one that fits into a bay in the PC and runs off the IDE cable) but when i put the HDD it does not recognize it. When I did some tinkering in the utilities managers I was able to access it but ALL it shows is a small recovery partition and nothing within the HDD. Is there any suggestions? How can I access the files on the HDD without destroying what is on there? Would it be better to use a USB to IDE cable? Is there any software out there that can help with this?
Does the partition show up as "raw", if it does it's probably corrupted. You can do a scandisk (with the box to fix errors checked). This should make all the data viewable again.
If that doesn't work you can use the free "testdisk" to recover your data. It has a addon called "photorec" that is good at recovering data.
Is your main HDD IDE as well or is it SATA. If IDE, make sure the bad HDD is set to slave. Also, try booting into a bartPE cd or a linux live cd and check to see if your data is viewable.
??? Okay I had 3 HDD's, two of which I was able to get the PC to recognize as Local Disk C: reformatted and erased all data (after removing the files I wanted), My main HDD is I: and yes it is a SATA. I have tried the last HDD (a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 160GB) in Slave and cable select (By the by the PC recognized the other two as cable select)The results are the same wit the Seagate HDD: It takes forever for it to be found by the PC, when it does it shows two disks: C: and another called recovery D: When I attempt to explore C: (the Seagate) windows says that the disk is not formatted and asks if I want to formatt it. The problem is I know that when I reformatt the disk it will erase all the picture that are on it and these are the files (THE ONLY FILES) I am trying to save and remove from the HDD. Any suggestons are greatly appreciated as I am really getting frustrated with this project. I have also tried a couple programs Disk Director and Paragon Harddisk Manager to try to access the info.
