Help recover a hard drive

[isapiens]

I am trying to recover my friends hard drive data.

Currently i have a an sata HD. His is an older one with ribbon cable connection.

I though if i just hook it up to my PC i can load into my Windows and copy files from his HD. However, when i hook up his HD, my windows wont load. I will see the loading logo but then it just sits there with a black screen. I also put the jumper on his HD to slave. Not sure if that was the correct thing to do.

I have never recovered lost data cuz i always backed mine up. Help would be appreciated.

[floodhound2]

Go into the bios and make sure to boot the sata hard drive first. Sometimes you need to put a jumper on the sata hard drive making it a master. Placing his disk as slave was logically a good idea but its often not the solution.

Don't sweat it the computer just needs to know what to do.

[z3r0aCc3Ss]

If u hv another connector and power supply cord, connect his HDD to ur comp, make ur HDD as 1st boot priority. This should solve the prob, i think.
If data is already lost, use some software to recover it.
I recovered mine, wen my hdd was formatted and installed new OS. Although, i didn't get whole data back, i got only 30% of it.

[isapiens]

Ok.

My primary drive is SATA so i found out you dont do anything with the jumper. And the second drive that i am trying to recover is IDE so the jumper needs to be on CS. Not sure what CS stands for.

So i managed to load my SATA hard drive. And i can see the second drive in My computer. It says 20GB full out of 60. However, when i try to open i only see one folder with a long name which is only numbers and letters. When i open that there two files "amd64" and "i386". Anyone know what this means?

[bad_brain]

no ideas what that means, but that's not the way you recover data on a HDD anyway...

you have to read the raw data from the HDD and store it on another HDD which is known to be free from failures, don't try to manipulate data on the damaged HDD, it will make things only worse. of course you will not be able to retrieve a 100% image of the HDD like it was before the damage, it's all about getting as much data from it as possible.
get PhotoRec, it's a good and free recovery software (don't worry about the "photo" in the name, it recovers a lot of file formats, not just images):
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[isapiens]

aha well that makes sense lol. I got the program you recomended b_b. It got me some pictures and it stops after 10 minutes of running. It just says 4 hours left and freezes there. Does that mean HD caput?

Any other free programs you can recommend?

[bad_brain]

hm, you can try this one:
http://www.pcinspector.de/default.htm?language=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

if that also fails I have a 3rd one as last chance...

[floodhound2]

CS by the way means Cable select. It basically allows for the cable to make the distention on what is master and slave.

I use a file recovery program that is free, cant think of the name of it at the moment. Pm me if you need more details.

Otherwise BB suggestion seems like a great option.

[z3r0aCc3Ss]

Use GetDataBack. Its d best software i'hv ever used. Its only for windows. If u want portable version, u can get it easily, or PM me.

link removed by b_b // I know you just tried to help, but handle such stuff via PM please

[computathug]

Also take a look for ERD Commander. It is easy to navigate too.

Its a live CD which is very easy to use

[Kitchisaki]

Thank you for the info.Now i can finally get back my old HDD.

[isapiens]

I guess Kitchisaki was having the same issue. But thanks for providing me the names of the programs. i was able to recover some files and pictures. The hard drive is messed up, its got bad sectors. it was 5 years old. So i purchased a new one.

Thanks again.