Rank: Wiz
Rating: 85%, 65 votes
I would get another hard disk, replace the old one with it, and plug your old hard drive into the other drive controller socket (rigt next to where your HD is plugged in now. you can plug them both onto the same ribbon cable if it has enough plugs on it. another cable may need to be purchased.
On the back of the HDD are little black jumpers that can be placed in different positions
If you are putting t\both drives on one ribbon cable then Move the new HDD jumper to be "MASTER" and the old one to "SLAVE". If u look at the hard drive, there'll be a label on top to tell you how to orient the jumpers.
If u use 2 cables and different sockets on t he Motherboard, both can be set to MASTER.
Boot your new Hard Drive and open a File Explorer window
If you are fortunate you may be able to see the contents pf the other drive. Copy as much as you can back to your new drive. DONT COPY THE WINDOWS FOLDER!!! If your old disk is corrupt, it may corrupt your new installtion. Just copy data files if u can and re-install any programs from cd's.
Some data may be corrupted and there may be nothing to recover.
Dont run scandisk on the broken drive, Some files may take ages to copy as the disk may be read over and over....be patient.
Hope this helps and is not beyond your skills of computers!
:)
Comments:
Jan 07, 2009
- u could take your pc to a store, get them to fit the new drive and ask them to copy whatever they can from the old drive to a seperate folder on your new one. I doubt they would charge much labor.
Be so careful about usiing recovery/scandisk type software, otherwise retrievable data can be ruined by these programs. There is some data recovery software that will do the job better, but "disk repair" software will not often recover usable data.
U can also try to boot from a CD and see if you can read the disk from there. You'll still need a new HD though. If you have an OS update disk you can try to run setup and re-install the old hd, but once a disk starts with errors, they just deteriorate.