Hard Drive Recovery Issues

What OS is on this old drive? You may be able to use a boot disk and access the data one the drive, or re-run setup.exe on top of your current c:\windows directory (IF you are using Win9x -- a reinstall on top will not change your data/programs/apps ; it will however recognize the new systemboard/video drivers etc and may allow use of the old hdd).

Another alternative -- and usually the best alternative -- is to install the old hdd as a secondary drive (look at the jumpers on the drive), and then transfer what you need to the booting hdd. Then format the old hdd and via network cable (or any methed --serial cable connection, IR or whatever), transfer the data back to the new machine with the old hdd as boot.

Your brand new systemis recognizing the old hdd, but it is configured for entirely different hardware (the hardware in your old computer). You need to get the data off of it, format it, and then transfer the data back on to it.

One of the easiest steps overlooked is setting the jumpers! I've made this mistake more times than I can count and know how frustrating this can be. If you have both drives on the same IDE channel, ensure the jumper settings determine the new drive as Master and your old drive as Slave. In some systems, however, you may need to set them to cable select. Another option is to have them both mastered (or single) on separate IDE channels, depending on what you already have on the particular channels. If your drive doesn't have jumper lables, ie; MA | SL | CS, Samsung's website should have thd documentation.

Regardless of the jumper settings, the BIOS will see both drives if they are plugged in properly.

Another thing may be filesystem. If your primary drive is, say, FAT32 and your secondary drive is NTFS, the FAT32 will not recognize NTFS.

Hard drives are sensitive just like most other computer parts. One thing, as much as I'd hate to say it, if the jumper settings and location on the IDE cable make no difference, it may have crashed in the change. Sometimes it just takes a little jolt to cause the read/write head to make contact with the platters inside the drive.

Hopefully, that is not the case and it's a simple matter of jumper settings or location in the chain.

Good luck! I'd be interested to know what the resolution is.

Regards,
Jesse

Your problem have two points:
1- Your OS-Operating System (Old & New Disk)
2- Your Capacity-10,20,30,40,... Gb (Old & New Disk)
Send information about this points for help

It would help to know how you've got the drive connected, the drives sizes, OS and type of fat table.

I doubt if there's anything wrong with the drive. This seems (as mentioned) like a jumper issue. Put the older drive on a cable by itself with the jumper set to single/master. You can try CS (cable select) but if atrtached by itself single /master should be fine. Don't attach CDROM on the same cable.

If you cannot get the drive to read there's a data recovery program called R-Studio thatwill read from any file system and will allow for copying files off a drive. It uses an Explorer interface and is really easy to understand and use. As long as the drive isn't physically damaged the partitions can be read and copied from. The site has a demo version that allows you to first see if the data is available before purchase. By the way the software is about 70.00.

http://www.r-tt.com/RStudio.shtml

Besides what's already mentioned, can't think of too much else to try. Did any software or drivers come with the old hard drive? If so can you go into control panel & add new hardware? Do you have a CD burner, if so maybe you could set the old driveas master by itself & burn contents to a cd, then copy to new hard drive. If your O/S is WIN2K, have you done a simple 'Scan for Hardware Changes' in device manager? You could also try going into the BIOS & specifically telling it the hard drive is there.
Just guessing here, let me know if any of this helped.