I pulled the hard drive out of my old PC when the power supply died and hooked it up to my laptop with an IDE-USB converter. Once I got everything working I could open up the drive and see everything on the old HDD except my user data. All the system and program files were there, but I met dead ends when trying to find my Desktop, pics, music, documents, basically anything beyond C:\Documents and Settings. Deep searches for some of my files were fruitless.


Is this because my laptop loads its internal HD as master and thus loads only its user info, ignoring that on my old HD? I've got the jumper pins on the old HD set on master (that's what the IDE-USB converter requires anyway), but there's no way in my laptop's system utilities to tell it to boot from USB.

I'm trying to look up the jumper diagram for my laptop's HD (there are only 2 pin couples, nothing is jumped atm) to see if I can set it to slave, but even then I'm not sure it'll look to USB for a master drive.

I'm about to try pulling the HD from my laptop while leaving the external plugged in to see if I can force it to boot from my old drive.


Any help would be very much appreciated, I'm a few leaps and bounds short of a guru on this stuff


$1

1/21/2009 9:54:07 PM

I swear I'm having deja vu.

1/21/2009 10:17:54 PM

Yeah I made a new, more relevant thread. Many of you have been along for the whole ride!


$1

1/21/2009 10:27:35 PM

this has nothing to do with the master/slave jumpers and a vanishingly small probability of being related to any jumper setting at all, though it could possibly be related to the 8gb or 128gb clip jumper if present

due to it's localization in Documents and Settings, it almost sounds like a permission issue

1/21/2009 11:21:36 PM

could be...when I try to open the Owner subfolder in Documents and Settings I get an "access is denied" error. How would I go about changing the permissions on that drive?

$1

1/21/2009 11:51:34 PM

^You use google:
http://www.windowsbbs.com/windows-xp/52200-access-denied-documents-settings-folder-old-hd-after-moving-new-pc.html

1/22/2009 12:54:02 AM

drew once again you're my fucking hero



all fixed and I learned a few things along the way, I'll call it a day.


$1

1/22/2009 2:19:22 AM

haha, nice! Glad you got it going. What did you end up doing for a torx bit to fit the electronics?

Hopefully the drives you have aren't one of these: message_topic.aspx?topic=556130

1/22/2009 10:41:57 AM

swung by home depot and picked up an 8-in-1 torx driver, turned out to be a t9 bit. swapping the circuit boards was EASY, I figured there'd be some catch to it but it was as simple as unbolting and picking it up.

and no, this is an older HDD, it's their 7200.7 80gb model. wonder what caused their error though


$1

[Edited on January 22, 2009 at 3:05 PM. Reason : grammar is underrated]

1/22/2009 3:03:36 PM