Hardware·18,997 discussions

Slave my HDD!!! It seems so cruel!

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Hi everyone,

So, my SATA HDD went funky on my Toshiba, (disk read error etc.) and i bought a SATA HD enclosure to move my files onto my old Sony. I couldn’t acess any of my pictures or songs on the secondary drive (G:),then i read the posts here and discovered i have to take ownership…cool, sounds reasonable…BUT, does that require me to set my secondary hard drive (G:) as a slave? Does SATA require that? If i do have to set it as a slave to the Sony HD, how does one go about that? Is it physical change of the pins or more “internal”?
P.S. When i am able to access all of my files, am i limited to just copying them to the Sony HD or can i dump the entire secondary drive (G:)to the Sony (C:)? Thanks for your help everyone!

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Clarifications

In reply to Slave my HDD!!! It seems so cruel!

Clarifications

Should be able to copy the majority

In reply to Slave my HDD!!! It seems so cruel!

I’ve managed to copy 99 percent of all the drives I’ve religated to slaves on newer units. Some had trouble moving parts of the MBR but that was a sector failure and not really essential anyway, at least not as a slave. Each new unit I build gets a new master drive but gets one and sometimes two slave drives from previous builds that still have some photos, videos and music on them.

Sata Hard Drives are preset as Master with no jumpers.

In reply to Slave my HDD!!! It seems so cruel!

Seeing that you are using it in a caddy you should be able to plug it in and connect to it. I notice that you are already calling it G: does this mean that you are already connected.
As mjd420nova has said once you take ownership you will be able to copy what you like as long as the Drive isn’t damaged.

G up!

In reply to Sata Hard Drives are preset as Master with no jumpers.

Yeah, i’m connected. Haven’t been able to work with it yet, but looking forward to it. Now, can i ONLY copy from the G: to the C: or can i also move (remove) data from the G: and place it only on the C:?

You should be

In reply to G up!

able to copy both ways, but I would be retrieving my Data from the Drive first by doing a copy. Use your C: Drive as a staging point. If you have sufficient room on C: I would be backing up to there. You can burn the information to CD/DVD later. If you start to get errors you should be able to tell what file it was up to during the copy. You can then deselect that file and continue on. You did mention that you have disk read errors.

One of the ways that early problems with hard disks manifest themselves is with problems reading a particular area of the disk: a read error. If the disk develops a bad spot where it can no longer reliably read what is written there, you will not know this until you try to read from the sector where the problem is. If it is occupied by a seldom-used file, you may not notice for weeks or months. However, many drives start out with a handful of bad sectors and then develop more later on. This doesn’t always happen, but it does often enough that it is very useful to detect these read errors as quickly as possible.

For this reason, utility programs were developed that test the surface of a disk for read errors. They scan over the surface of the disk and read the contents of every sector, looking for problems, and report if any are found. This increases the chances of detecting a problem with your hard disk when it occurs first with seldom-accessed files, before it spreads to more important parts of the disk.
The most common disk error checkers are in fact part of the same utilities that scan for file system corruption–Microsoft’s Scandisk and Norton’s Disk Doctor. Even though the same utility scans for both file system problems and read errors, recognize that these are very different problems that are being detected. These programs often call the portion of their work where disk read errors are detected the “Surface Scan” or “Surface Test”, referring to the platter surfaces on the disk where the data is stored.

Good Luck 🙂

With SATA Drives there is nothing to set

In reply to Slave my HDD!!! It seems so cruel!

All you need do is plug into the USB Caddy and then plug into the NB and copy across.

Only possible problem is if you had XP Pro and where using EFS as you’ll copy Encrypted Files across to your New HDD but not have access to the Encryption Key.

To save a copy of the Encryption Key for XP Pro computers at least follow these directions but you need to Boot off that Drive to do this.

http://tinyurl.com/3cd8hf

Another thing to remember is if the drive is Flaky do not leave it on all the time as it will fail far sooner than a correctly working drive. USB enclosures do not allow the Drives Inside them to run cool enough so they have a shorter life expediency than they otherwise would.

If you changed OS’s with the HDD you may have no chance of recovering Encrypted Data or at least recover it in a way that is readable.

If that is an issue you need to start another Question with the exact details of the Old OS the New OS what you where using and so on.

Col

Same old, same old OS

In reply to With SATA Drives there is nothing to set

Thanks for the leg up Col.

Both HD are with XP Home Ed. So bearing your help in mind, i imagine i’m okay with EFS or diff OS?

Thanks for the link too, good info.

EFS Only comes on the Pro version of XP

In reply to Same old, same old OS

And has been responsible for many End Users Loosing their Data. Well loosing access to their Data at least.

Some have even gone tot he trouble of Backing it up Encrypted and then wonder why they can not read it when things go wrong.

Col

SATA or SATA II

In reply to Slave my HDD!!! It seems so cruel!

The only configuration on a SATA drive is if you have a SATA II drive and a SATA 1 controller, you may need to set a jumper to limit the data rate of the drive to the lower speed.

Keep in mind that when a hard drive starts having read problems, you may have trouble recovering data from the drive. And, some hard drive enclosures actually make it harder to recover data as they do not provide proper cooling for the hard drive.

Contact me via peer mail, and I can send you an old Tech Republic article on hard drive data recovery. It will be a week or so before I can send it to you as I am on the road.

Chas

Sounds good..

In reply to SATA or SATA II

Will peer shortly.

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