Well, here we are again, a few months after my computer went kaflooie....if ya all remember, my windows got corrupted and Staples wanted $195.00 minimum to TRY to get my windows back up and operating.....

so, I went and bought a new computer, but I have realized over the last couple of months that I really do have some files in the old computer that I really do not want to lose. If my windows program wouldn't open and was corrupted, is the hard drive still viable and could my poetry files be retrieved by those hard drive back up systems I see for sale everywhere or won't that work because even if I do plug in the old computer, it won't start up because of the windows issue..... what I mean to say here is can those hard drive retrieval thingies still work without windows having to start up????

This post has been edited by compudodo: Jun 4 2009, 04:13 PM

Ah I was hoping such a beast existed, couldn't find one here though, only Sata ones, This is the one I was looking at, eSATA but no ide, I take it that one does laptop ide as well does it ?
Might have to look for one here, would save me a lot of messing around with all the systems I deal with, Thanks for that.


There are a couple of things here, 1st is the jumpers on the drive itself, initially they may be set as master, because thats what it was, you need to set the jumper on the drive to tell it to be a slave then the system knows how to treat it, the jumper has 3 settings, Master, Slave and CS (Cable Select), some systems are fussy about using CS, and vice versa, there should be a guide on the hard drive to show each position, mind you they can be hard to see so you may need to view it from several angles and lighting, so if CS doesn't work try slave and vice versa.

The CMOS settings again may being affected by this as well, so getting that right may help, also when you connect to the drive make sure you use the centrer plug as that is the position for the slave drive, also by switching drives it may be the system has incorrectly change the boot priority so it needs to be told which drive to boot too again, but the cable you saw is a simplified dock really, a bit more portable than a dock and for one off cases like this may be the better choice, hope you get a solution that works for you.