moving a hard drive

[cromwell]

Hey Guys,

I recieved an old cryix 5x86 system that needs to be cleaned up and made into a system that can run a simple dos based program. The orignal owners want some files off the old seagate st9655ag (524 MB) hard drive. I figured that I could just plug the HD into my Athlon 800 computer and burn a CD-rom with the whole HD on it.

My problem:

the Bios in my athlon machine reconized the seagate HD, but I can't get a drive letter for it in either Dos or windows.

Crom

[Dinosaur]

If BIOS recognizes the drive, it has to be some OS or Fdisk problem.

What OS are you running and what OS was running on the other system?

For example, OS/2 uses HPFS file system and WIN NT/2K use NTFS. I know that HPFS will cause a partition not to be recognized by another OS, and I think the same is true for NTFS. A utility called Partition Magic can convert from one File system to another with certain exceptions and restrictions. HPSF cannot be converted to anything, but FAT can be converted to HPFS. FAT & FAT32 can be converted to NTFS, but vice versa has some restrictions. Unix probably has its own file system.

If not an OS problem, it is likely to be an Fdisk problem. Fdisk is the utility which partitions a hard drive, and is the first piece of software which works on a drive. Fdisk utilites for different OS’s are not always compatible, because they create slightly different data about the drive geometry.

If you had a boot disk from the other system, you could use it to boot your system and see if you can do a directory command or otherwise look at the drive. That would at least indicate the drive was readable.

Most Fdisk problems cannot be resolved. For some situations the boot disk from the old system can successfully copy files to the host system. If there are only a few data files to be retrieved, you can probably use the boot disk from the old system to write to a Diskette on the new system.

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Gouverneur
Eschew Obfuscation!
If one hundred million people believe a foolish idea, it is still a foolish idea.

[ez]

Maybe there could be another type of solution:

Copy from old computer to the new computer using serial or parallel cable and some software like LapLink or pcAnywhere (for DOS - old versions), or similar.

Or, if they dont need too many megabytes from the old computer - you could use diskettes.

HTH
ez http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

[cromwell]

Hey Guys,

Thanks for the help.

I tried the startup disks for win 98 and 95 but had no luck. I think I'll get what I can on floppies.

Crom

[Adam Pintar]

I am not positive but was the hard drive that you are trying to get information off the primary drive of the old system.

and if so it is set as a primary dos partition that is active.

does it not have to be set as a extended partition so he can have the two hard drives in his computer.

you can do this with fdisk but dont quote me on this I could be wrong so ask around

Adam: http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

[PostCode]

How is it being recognized in the Cyrix mashine in the BIOS? Is it being recognized in the Athlon as an LBA drive? If so, use Normal instead. The drive has to be seen the same way in both machines in order to gain access to it. Hope this helps.

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BiosCentral (http://www.bioscentral.com)

[This message has been edited by PostCode (edited 04-15-2001).]