i turned my pc on ( hp pavilion 751n) one day and it said "no operating system", how did i lose XP. I don't have a boot disk. And I can't get it to go in safe mode like i use to do for windows 98. all i have are recovery disks that will erase everything and restore it to original settings. so i buy a new pc thinking i can slave out the old HDD like i've done before but NO! new pc's are SATA old pc was IDE. so i buy an adapter and connect it via USB. The new pc recognizes the drive but wants me to format it to be abled to use it.so how do i retrieve my old data ?
All your sys info is gone because it cannot be accessed. Most likely because the hard dive is bad or something erased the boot info files. When you replaced the PC, it uses different drivers. The chances of having it boot from you previous PC are slim to none. The PATA > SATA > USB will not work either. Fresh install may be the only way. Hopefully your old setup didn't have critical data. When upgrading an OS or PC you should have critical files backed up and kept your information including passkeys stored on a hard copy and or a separate hard drive. That way you can go to the software developer and download the software you had without having to purchase it again. Jeff
I don't quite follow you. Of course I know the OS on the old HD is gone But I have had HD's crash before. I have always then bought a new PC and used the old HD as a slave to the new HD. I was always then able to retrieve the old files from the old HD even though it had no OS I was still able to use it as storage space. That's when the HD's were IDE. SATA has thrown me a curve. I have already successfully connected it as a separate external drive with USB connection. But it wanted me to reformat the drive to be able to use it. That would defeat the purpose of trying to retrieve my files. Yes I should have backed them up. And for the most part, I have. But there are some I haven't and I still want to see if I can get them back. They sell adapters so that you can connect ide to sata or sata to ide internally. I tried one but the old drive wasn't recognized. Since SATA doesn't slave out drives and sees them separately maybe I can't use SATA. I wonder if there are any newer PC's that use IDE still. I'll just have to wait for answers.
The recovery discs you speak of don't just reinstall they are also used to do a non destructive repair,do a web search for the necessary info Run recovery software is your best bet my personal favorite is runtime's getdata back,if it can't find the data you never will these three software makers have free software for recovery,under no circumstances use partition recovery unless all other avenues are exhausted & at this stage do not run chkdsk easeus minitool photorec hirens bootcd has recovery utilities there's another live cd but i can't recall it's name any of you guys know the one i'm speaking of there's also system rescue over at distro watch in left column down about half way or just over half lastly check your pm box edit:that should be right column not left,i was think'n coz your on the other side of the planet my right would be your left,well that's my excuse & i'm stick'n to it
