My system, stable for quite a long time, suddenly froze and then tried to reboot itself a couple of days ago. Some investigation indicated the SATA interface on the mobo had died. A new mobo got past that problem – I created a new Windows on another hard drive.
Now I need to open the old SATA drive to copy off files from it. When I plug it into the SATA on the mobo, the system refuses to boot. It freezes with a blank gray screen right after it complete the Windows startup screen (the one with the waving Windows logo and the blue progress indicator. If I pull the old disk out, the boot is normal. The BIOS seems to see the disk, but Windows doesn’t like it for some reason. What is the best way to access the disk and copy files?
