2nd Hard Drive

[MattNhisVista]

First of all I have been on here quite a few times this is my first post. You seem such a helpful bunch I wanted to join. So, Hello. and thanks for reading.

I accidentally run "sysprep" on my machine. Vista Home Premium. It kept on booting to a completely reset profile and I could not get it to load into my normal profile. I recovered my machine to the "out of box" state using recovery.

I have a secondary hard drive and now Vista will not recognise the 2nd drive. It always used to. I can see it in BIOS and I can hear it running. During boot up it hangs at the Vista loading bar and if left long enough will go to a black / blank screen. If I take it out it will load to normal profile.

If you would be kind enough I would like to know if there is anything I can do to fix it. I have 10 years of photos on this drive and would be devastated if I lose them. This was my supposed to be my back up drive. Grrrr.

Thanks for reading and any help would be greatly rcvd. Many thanks in advance.

Regards.


Matt.

 

[Jonathan_King]

Welcome!

As I understand, all you are asking is how to save your data? Tell me, is the 2nd hard drive SATA or IDE?

SATA is hot-pluggable. In other words, you can connect it to the motherboard and power supply without rebooting.

If you can get into Windows, all you need to do is hook up he cables, go into Disk Management, and select Rescan Disks from the Action Menu.

Hope this helps,
~JK

 

[MattNhisVista]

Many thanks for taking the time to read and post a reply. Gratefully rcvd.

Sorry about that. it is an IDE drive.

This is where i got to :

I have a secondary hard drive and now Vista will not recognise the 2nd drive. It always used to. I can see it in BIOS and I can hear it running. During boot up it hangs at the Vista loading bar and if left long enough will go to a black / blank screen. If I take it out it will load to normal profile.

i am worried that I have damaged the pins on the back. I took it out because i was worried by doing a recovery it would wipe my data. I have looked a the pins and I am not sure if one is missing.

This is really bugging me. Any help is greatfully rcvd.

Matt.

 

[Dwarf]

Hi Matt and welcome to Vista Forums

It is normal for one pin to be missing in the connector - this, coupled with a blocked socket at the same position on the cable, provides a key to prevent the cable from being inserted incorrectly.

You might like to check the jumpers on the drives. If you only have one drive, it makes no difference as to the jumper position, but for best performance a single drive should be set to the MA (MAster) position and should be plugged in to the end of the cable. The middle connector is for a secondary drive, and the jumper on this should be set to SL (SLave). You might find that they are set to CS (Cable Select), but I don't recommend that setting and have found in the past that I have got more reliable performance if the devices are explicitly configured as master and slave.