Hard Drive Problems - saving data - help!

[Larry K]

Hello, hoping you can help me out with a friend's PC.

Here is the situation:

1) "Computer A" is the main computer. It starting having issues, HD making noises, and blue screen of death occurring.

2) THERE IS LOTS OF DATA on Computer A that needs to be saved

3) So I said to do this--- Will this work? What type of problems <might> occurr? Also, is this process correct?

- take Computer A's hard drive out
- place ( install ) it in Computer B, as the slave drive
- Computer B should just recognize it and place it as the next drive letter (via windows explorer)... nothing else needs to be done???

- If this works, just take the data off of Computer A's hard drive and save it to Computer B.

Notes:

I'm not sure which or what OS either computer is?
Should it matter?

No other settings should need to be done, right? Or should something be editted or changed in CMOS?

Thanks for your help.... I've done this on my PC (long time ago) but can't remember any little details--- I thought you can just pretty much attach the second HD to the existing cable (as the slave drive)

thanks
Larry

 

[Larry K]

oh... I forgot...
you need to set the jumper on the second hard drive to "slave" setting.
hopefuly, the second drive has easy to read diagram of the jumpers

any thoughts on the 1st post?

 

[Larry K]

THanks... here is update

(hopefully I did not screw up the second PC)

1.) the second PC was an eMachine which the hard drive cable did not have the second connector for the other drive.. SO we took computer A's IDE cable which had 2 connectors.

2) changed the jumper for the hard drive and added it to the eMachine PC (plug in the cable, etc)

3) now with the second HD connected (but no power, we forgot to plug in the power plug for the HD) and using other computers IDE cable... we turned on the PC... It started to boot and ask for disk in floppy A drive??? Weird? why is it asking that when all we technically did was swop IDE cables and add the slave drive.

4) misteriously the computer turned off by it self (not good)

5) however, I asked if the second hard drive power plug was in... which it was not... so we did that.

6) BUT now.. the eMachine computer will not power up. It does nothing????????????

I have no clue what happened. Why the machine will not power up. We double and triple checked to make sure a plug was not 'accidently' unplugged.... but nothing.

We put the eMachine back the way it was before we messed with it... And nothing.. NO POWER??????????????

Great, now we have 2 machines that don't work

anythoughts on why the eMachine stopped powerin up?

THANKS

PS. FYI I was helping my friend via the phone

 

[Larry K]

okay... update again....

yes... yuck on the emachines!!

okay, after few tries, back to the orginal config on the emachine, but now its in a loop for booting up windows????

here is the loop

1. turn on
2. emachine screen logo
3. flicker the notices, echo statemements
4. windows boot
5. windows logo -- status bar at bottom
6. gets to the end AND

then goes back to emachine (step 2)

????
now what gives? any thougths

what is causing the boot up loop?

thanks

 

[Larry K]

well, its w2k pro... I tried for few hours on the phone... tried basically everything I could think of:
boot up in safe mode,
debugging mode,
any mode
tried setting bios to default settings
and few other things... NOTHING

they are taking the PC to another person who has floppy boot up disk.???
Maybe the PC had a virus?

BUT thanks for helping!!