So my brother in law calls and tells me that his box started smoking so he turned it off. Good plan. He also started pulling connections to the MOBO from the CD/R and HDD. The big black hole in the MOBO told him he wasn’t going to lose much with this move.
When I looked at the box, I could see that his power supply had fried and killed the MOBO too. Everything else looked pretty un-damaged.
So here is the problem. We THINK that the original SATA drive didn’t get hit. We tried putting it into a known good system to retrieve the data (grrr- how many times to I have to tell them- MAKE BACKUPS!!!!!)but no good on that front. There is no way on the (new)good system to run a SATA slave- or at least, none that I could see. The new sys could see it, it couldn’t boot from it.
My best shot to retrieving the data would be to run the old SATA as a slave to the new SATA and throw the data to a thumb drive or CD.
I have found cables on the i-net that will run a SATA from USB. That is $25 I don’t want to spend until I hear some feedback. Has anyone used this kind of cable? Does it work???
How do I solve this??? Incidentally, I did try to boot the dead sys. Even with a new PS, it remained dead. Might have been that black hole on the MOBO…
If you need original sys specs,
Pentiun 4 HT 2.8 Ghz
1 MB L2 cache
PC-3200(400 Mhz)Mem Speed
DDR – SDRAM- 512 origina, upgraded to 1G
160 GB HDD
SATA – 150 Drive controller
XP Home Edition- Updates turned on- Purchased 2 years, 3 months ago.
HP desktop system.
If additional information is needed, just ask. My goal is to get the information off the original drive. If that is not do-able, my next goal is to destroy the old drive as it contains personal NPI that I want to insure is safe.
Thanks so much for your help!