Changed my mobo --- hard drive problem

Bristolian

Suspended / Banned
Messages
4,428
Name
Steve
Edit My Images
Yes
Howdy folks,

I changed the mobo in my PC yesterday and now have a problem with one of my hard drives as the computer thinks it's not formatted - it is and has about 50Gb of music files on it!

This is a 80Gb IDE drive which was formatted to NTFS and only contains data - no OS or anything. I have tried it both as master and slave but Windows still says it's unformatted. The OS is Win7 Ultimate 32bit (although I'm going to be upgrading that to 64bit this week sometime).

I'm guessing that the FAT has somehow become corrupted - is that even possible :shrug:

Does anyone have any suggestions for recovering this drive as I really don't want to have to reload all those music files ... hundreds of albums ... thousands of tracks ... lots of time :thumbsdown:
 
Hi Neil,

I've used two different IDE cables. Moved the HDD to a different bay. Used a different power cable.

I'm gonna check to see if there are any BIOS upgrades for the mobo with reference to HDD issues.

Thanks for the suggestions, though :)
 
An 80G drive must be really old. I'd have thought it would work but you may be better off putting it either in a USB enclosure or a different computer and see if it reads there.
 
An 80G drive must be really old.

Morning Robert. Yes, it is getting on a bit I suppose. It might even be the original hard drive that came with the computer (of which only the case remains) about 10 years ago.

I'd have thought it would work but you may be better off putting it either in a USB enclosure or a different computer and see if it reads there.

My USB enclosures are all SATA, unfortunately but if I get some time later I'll try it in my wife's PC. Better hope I don't break that though or my name will be mud :D

Thanks for the suggestions :)
 
You can buy a cheap IDE / USB interface cable which plugs into the back of an IDE drive (both power and data connections) from Maplin - about £20 - use that to copy the content to another drive then reformat the disk and copy everything back. I have done this to recover data from disks in otherwise dead computers.
 
Back
Top