Computer tech help, please...

[fogg88]

Okay, so my parents' old computer died (dad claims there was a 'bad boot sector' message upon POST). Since they had a lot of pictures from their travels on the HD, they asked me to see if I could salvage them.

I figured (maybe erroneously), that if just the boot sector was bad, I could still slave the drive to my computer and access the rest of the files. So, I plugged in a ribbon cable and power from my PC, made sure the parents' HD jumpers were set to 'slave', while the other on the ribbon was 'master', and powered up.

My computer (running Win2K, btw) recognizes that there's a hard drive there, but gives me the message that the volume is unformatted, and asks me if I'd like to format. ...obviously, this would run counter to what I'm trying to accomplish.

So, is there anything else I could try to salvage the data off this drive, or is it a lost cause? Thanks for any help or input you guys can give!!

 

[Dial_tone]

Did you try running Scandisk on it anyway? I got that to work with an XP system recently.

 

[fogg88]

Did you try running Scandisk on it anyway? I got that to work with an XP system recently.

Thanks for the reply.

So, I'm assuming I would just run Scandisk, and then point towards where the bad HD is?

...also, can I download Scandisk anywhere easily? I don't seem to have it under system tools (unless it's something I'd run from the command prompt?).

 

[blut wump]

Try giving it its own ribbon cable on another channel as master. Older drives can sometimes get confused with one another. Ensure that the bios can ident the drive correctly before letting the OS into the picture.

Failing that... ^^^

 

[fogg88]

Try giving it its own ribbon cable on another channel as master. Older drives can sometimes get confused with one another. Ensure that the bios can ident the drive correctly before letting the OS into the picture.

Failing that... ^^^

Thanks for the tip... I'll give that a try too!