i have recently bought a new tower unit with vista home premium pre installed on the h/d.i want to get all the data off my old h/d from my old computer which will not work as the motherboard's capacitors have blown.it was cheaper to buy a new tower than upgrade a5yr old unit.my old h/d has winxp installed on it tho.i tried to make it a slave to my new vista h/d's master but the computer would'nt startup.i took out the xp h/d and am looking for help
One thing you could try is to get an external enclosure for the drive - then you can plug it in when in windows and it should show up. Ive never used an old system HDD as a slave internally before but I would have thought it would work as the PC (in bios) should be looking to load the system files off the master drive and it shouldnt make a difference whats on the slave.
yeah so the external enclosure would probly work and if you really want it in the case you should make shure the XP drive is set to slave on its jumpper settings an put it into the first connector on the ribbon wire and your master should be on the end (last) now thats if it's an IDE HDD now if SATA then put it on master in the jumpper setting (if it has any some SATA do not or don't need) and plug it into the second marked SATA connector on your board. now you say you have a brand new computer so it might be running it's HDD and\or HDD's on SATA already but if your drive is an IDE drive and you might have to unplug it and go into your BIOS and turn the "IDE CONTROLLER" on my girlfriend's computer was like that and she has a MSI board .........so hope that helps
with the IDE i forgot to say that i ment the last (end) connector "away form the board " so in other words plug the cable in first to the board
or if rom drive is by iself then disconnect it & connect the old hd in it's place &you'll be able to copy info off then. i do that all the time on customers' with no problem.