I hope someone will be able to advise me regarding a problem I have here. I'll tell you the situation.
My friend has a hard drive which corrupted.. and has since bought a new computer. Now, I am trying to connect the drive as a secondary drive and use a data recovery program to retrieve the files (copy them to the new drive). This is something I have done quite easily before with my own computer, and has proven quite simple. However, now I have an unusual problem.
When I connect the old, corrupted drive to a spare IDE cable and try to power on the computer, the fans start to spin for 1 second - before the power flicks off. The computer refuses to boot: the POST screen is never displayed, and getting into the BIOS is impossible. I know that the jumper settings are correct: indeed, I am trying to boot with only two IDE devices connected: the primary master (as the computer's good, working boot drive) and the corrupted drive connected to the secondary IDE, alone as a master.
In the past, with my own computer, I have been able to "hot swap" my hard drives while the computer is on, by removing the secondary IDE channel in Windows Device Manager, then plugging in another hard drive, and telling Windows to find new hardware. It then finds the secondary channel again and detects the drive I just plugged in. However, now with my friend's computer this does not seem to be possible. With her Nvidia chipset (nForce 3), it seems that there are not two separate "primary" and "secondary" IDE channels: there is just one "Parallel ATA Controller" (and a SATA one, which is not being used). The problem with there just being one channel, which controls both the primary and secondary IDE devices, is that it is impossible to remove the channel in order to hot-swap drives, because of course the system/boot drive is also running on that channel. Windows does not allow you to remove access to its own O/S files, of course :)
So, to summarise, I have a problem. I am unable to connect this old corrupted drive to the computer in any way: it's not hot-swappable, and if I try connecting it before booting then the computer switches itself off after 1 second. Does anyone have any idea why the drive is causing this?
Thank you :)
My friend has a hard drive which corrupted.. and has since bought a new computer. Now, I am trying to connect the drive as a secondary drive and use a data recovery program to retrieve the files (copy them to the new drive). This is something I have done quite easily before with my own computer, and has proven quite simple. However, now I have an unusual problem.
When I connect the old, corrupted drive to a spare IDE cable and try to power on the computer, the fans start to spin for 1 second - before the power flicks off. The computer refuses to boot: the POST screen is never displayed, and getting into the BIOS is impossible. I know that the jumper settings are correct: indeed, I am trying to boot with only two IDE devices connected: the primary master (as the computer's good, working boot drive) and the corrupted drive connected to the secondary IDE, alone as a master.
In the past, with my own computer, I have been able to "hot swap" my hard drives while the computer is on, by removing the secondary IDE channel in Windows Device Manager, then plugging in another hard drive, and telling Windows to find new hardware. It then finds the secondary channel again and detects the drive I just plugged in. However, now with my friend's computer this does not seem to be possible. With her Nvidia chipset (nForce 3), it seems that there are not two separate "primary" and "secondary" IDE channels: there is just one "Parallel ATA Controller" (and a SATA one, which is not being used). The problem with there just being one channel, which controls both the primary and secondary IDE devices, is that it is impossible to remove the channel in order to hot-swap drives, because of course the system/boot drive is also running on that channel. Windows does not allow you to remove access to its own O/S files, of course :)
So, to summarise, I have a problem. I am unable to connect this old corrupted drive to the computer in any way: it's not hot-swappable, and if I try connecting it before booting then the computer switches itself off after 1 second. Does anyone have any idea why the drive is causing this?
Thank you :)
