HP Pavilion 7955 main HD failed; my data is on second drive (Maxtor ATA/EIDE) - still good. I want to install this as a second drive in Dell Optiplex 620 which has SATA main drive. The only IDE cables are for DVD/CD and floppy. How can I do this?

did you change the IDE cable and change the molex power cable on the other drives. could have fried the IDE riser. they do make pci card that have IDE risers on them. may try that route. if the bios does not see them the drive is not communicating with the MO BO or is not getting power

I assume you have two IDE controllers? IDE1 and IDE2, I'll try to help, the primary HD needs to have the pin set to primary and the secondary set to slave, if you're running both of these drives off of the same ribbon cable. You may have to go into your BIOS settings and check to make sure the Primary HD is the WD drive.

seems u have an earlier version of xp which does not have the AHCI drivers required under the default setting of the controller
Please follow this
http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/document?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&dn=1090643

you can purchase a longer ribbon. otherwise there is nothing else you can do.

If you need further help, reach me via phone at https://www.6ya.com/expert/mark_445a24324be9eb03

Mark,
You can use any size HDD in your computer as a slave and it does not have to be an exact match for the maxtor. You will however need the make sure that the connections on the new drive match. For example SATA drives will not attache to an IDE cable and vice versa. The drive that you mentioned is an IDE style drive so unless your MOBO has SATA connectors on it you will need to buy an IDE/EIDE drive.

i have need vista driver for dell so please help me that i solve my problem

set the jumper on the maxtor to cable select and see if that fix's things ?

According to http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/desktops/0,1000000973,10004197,00.htm this tower has Serial ATA, or SATA. Just to confirm, you can easily pop open the case and take a look at the hard-drives. If you see a wide thin ribbon-like cable connecting to your hard-drive then you need an Ultra ATA (or just ATA or IDE) drive. It looks like this:


If a thinner red cable connects to your drive, then that is SATA. It looks like this:

i see..well..was the old hard drive running xp by chance?..seems that with the new vista, that each application would need to be upgraded with drivers to pull the old data..another option is to use a data recovery service.

Hi, Below is an image of a Maxtor 3.5 HD settings as shown on the actual HD. If you are connecting 2 of them in a single IDE flat cable/strip, one must be master and the other must be slave. Jumper settings on the left is for master, the second is for slave. Hope this be of some help/idea. Post back how things turn up or should you need further information. Good luck and kind regards.