computer gurus needed

[jlindy]

13 months ago, I bought an EMachine's computer that ran XP. Long story short, the mother board apparently died on it unrelated to any user error and was just a poorly constructed computer. (EMachines support sucks too) Since it was 3 weeks outside of warranty, they wouldn't do anything so I had to buy a brand new computer. Since EMachines was so terrible, I ended up getting a Compaq Presario.

Before I bought the new computer, I brought the old one in to Best Buy's geek squad (where I bought it) and they said that the hard drive was fine and they could see all the files on it when they put it in one of their computers. The old hard drive has a lot of videos/pics of my daughter that I would prefer not to lose, so I wanted to recover that to the new computer.

I took out the old hard drive and plugged it into the remaining port for a secondary hard drive in my new compaq that is running vista on it. For some reason, once I plug it in and restart, the computer tries to boot up with XP and gets all screwed up. I can't get it to function like a secondary/external hard drive that you can see from the my computer window. Compaq's IM online tech support quickly tried to help me adjust a jumper setting (?) but that just started to boot up in vista and then switch over to XP if you can believe that.

How do I get my computer to see this hard drive without trying to boot everything through it? Any help would be appreciated. thanks.

Jeff

 

[sptrader]

13 months ago, I bought an EMachine's computer that ran XP. Long story short, the mother board apparently died on it unrelated to any user error and was just a poorly constructed computer. (EMachines support sucks too) Since it was 3 weeks outside of warranty, they wouldn't do anything so I had to buy a brand new computer. Since EMachines was so terrible, I ended up getting a Compaq Presario.

Before I bought the new computer, I brought the old one in to Best Buy's geek squad (where I bought it) and they said that the hard drive was fine and they could see all the files on it when they put it in one of their computers. The old hard drive has a lot of videos/pics of my daughter that I would prefer not to lose, so I wanted to recover that to the new computer.

I took out the old hard drive and plugged it into the remaining port for a secondary hard drive in my new compaq that is running vista on it. For some reason, once I plug it in and restart, the computer tries to boot up with XP and gets all screwed up. I can't get it to function like a secondary/external hard drive that you can see from the my computer window. Compaq's IM online tech support quickly tried to help me adjust a jumper setting (?) but that just started to boot up in vista and then switch over to XP if you can believe that.

How do I get my computer to see this hard drive without trying to boot everything through it? Any help would be appreciated. thanks.

Jeff

The drive must have a jumper in the SLAVE position. Then re-boot , go into bios and verify the drive is a slave. Re-boot again and it should be ok.

 

[MAJOR STONER]

Not familiar with Vista, but I use these w/XP...
Nexxtech 2.5 in Hard Drive enclosure ( NHDE25)

With an external drive, you can bootup then plug-in the drive. They are avilable at Circut City, also on ebay.

 

[hofffam]

As sptraders says....

Your new computer expects to find the operating system on the Master drive. You can only have one Master per hard drive connection. Your old drive is probably set for Master. So your computer is confused which one to boot from.

There is a small jumper on the connection end that usually sets the drive for Master, Slave, or Cable Select.

Cable Select means the drive will be master or slave depending on which of the two connectors it is connected to.

I prefer setting master/slave instead because I want to hook my drives to whichever connector is closest to each drive.

The jumper settings may be printed on the hard drive itself. If not - go to the manufacturers website and the jumpers will be diagrammed there.

 

[Carl Ramsey]

All good advice.

On the off chance these are SATA drives, you may have to enter the bios on bootup (usually del or F2 key) and find the boot drive section to tell the computer which drive to boot from.

 

[jond]

Not familiar with Vista, but I use these w/XP...
Nexxtech 2.5 in Hard Drive enclosure ( NHDE25)

With an external drive, you can bootup then plug-in the drive. They are avilable at Circut City, also on ebay.

If you still have problems after everyones advise, I would suggest just buying a $30 usb hard drive enclosure like Major above mentioned. It will require no computer skill, it should just work.

 

[jlindy]

Thanks for all the help. Since the jumper settings kept doing weird things and it wouldn't let me get to the BIOS screen, I ended up getting an enclosure. It was pretty simple, but it was $50-$60. Oh well. Thanks.