Help!? Computer geek needed urgently!

[amicus]

Hmmm...how to say this....

Long story, short synopsis...

Had to leave computer behind in recent relocation; upon advice...took hard drive, 'Western' something, can check if needed, 60 gigabyte, only about 20 percent used.

Just in case, I emailed myself many pertinent files, was able to find the 500 pieces of music I had stored, can access the program files...but cannot access any 'personal' files...?

Not that it matters, but had thousands of files of clip art for my books, links, articles, copies of Lit forum pieces, thousands of files I had accumulated and cannot access them.

Got an external hard drive enclosure, been going through, file by file to locate things...no success...

Even installed hard drive in another computer...it would not boot the drive...?

I am beginning to think the hard drive had an incestial relationship with the motherboard of the original computer and will not cleave to any other, but that seems rather silly even when I type it out...

Even took it to a 'Radio Shack' so called computer expert...and he said, nope, your files are not on there....well...I know they are on the drive..I just have no figured out how to access them....

Sighs....the computer was acquired as payment for work done on a newspaper, owned by a cop, all the software was pirated, and it never did work as well as I wished with printer and cd burner problems...so I was not saddened to abandon it, however...I would really like to be able to transfer files to my new little toshiba, which I do not like very much anyway as I hate this girly little damned keyboard and it will not accept a man sized external keyboard....

But should anyone have suggestions as to how to access and transfer files from a hardrive to another computer, I would surely be most appreciative...


thanks to one and all...


amicus...

 

[Couture]

Try GetBackData . It is free to use to determine if there is data there to rescue, and then you can pay for it to restore the data. Worked for me in the case of a flash memory card.

Good luck

 

[Weird Harold]

Had to leave computer behind in recent relocation; upon advice...took hard drive, 'Western' something, can check if needed, 60 gigabyte, only about 20 percent used.

Just in case, I emailed myself many pertinent files, was able to find the 500 pieces of music I had stored, can access the program files...but cannot access any 'personal' files...?

Western Digital is one of the major drive manufacturers. As far as I know, there is nothing peculiar to that brand that would cause your problem.

There are different ways of accessing a large drive like that and most of them involve a "logical drive translation" -- what you see in the BIOS setup for drive heads and sectors usually does NOT match the physical characteristics of the drive.

You need to determine what "logical drive translation" the original motheboard used when it formatted and wrote data to the drive in order to read data from it in a new computer.

How you're going to do that, I have no idea wwithout access to the original Motherboard's settings, but the "Auto-Detect" function of your BIOS is apparently not choosing the correct "logical drive" settings for that drive.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I have had problems with harddrives not working in an external drive enclosure also and have found that some enclosures will need the drive to be in slave mode where some don't.

Also what Harold suggested might be the problem, if the drive was partitioned you my not be able to see the complete drive.

 

[amicus]

Couture...that 'getdataback' looks like the answer I needed, thank you so very much. Wierd Harold & Zeb....thank you also...very nice to know help is there when needed....much appreciated.

amicus...

 

[Liar]

Could it be that aread of your old drive, where you stored the files mentioned were either encrypted or compressed? Had the same problem with a drive @ work a few months ago. All the profile data (files on the desktop and other profile specific folders) was unaccessible due to a third part scrambling/encryping software that I didn't have in the new computer.


/Liar, more geek than I'll ever admit.

 

[R. Richard]

One thing I would also suggest is to shop around your new area and find a local computer shop that either can do things like data recovery or has someone that they can use in emergencies. A good hacker can be a godsend.

 

[ChilledVodkaIV]

In 1802 Trevithick built one of his high pressure steam engines to drive an automatic hammer at the Pen-y-Daren iron works near Merthyr in South Wales. With the assistance of Rees Jones, an employee of the iron works and under the supervision of Samuel Homfray, the proprietor, he mounted the engine on a wagon chassis and turned it into a locomotive. In 1803 Trevithick sold the patents for his railway locomotives to Samuel Homfray.

"And one day," remarked Richard "You'll be able to pull all your ore from Penydarren to Abercynon, in about four hours. Give or take. Lookyou."

Samuel gazed at the engine in wonder then turned his eyes to Trevithick and told him "And one day you'll stop pretending you're a Welsh boy."

Richard smiled knowingly. "Aah see," he smiled "there's the beauty isn't it."

Samuel frowned.

Trevithick continued "In two hundred years time no one will even remember my name as a pioneer of railway engines. They'll sit there in their pub quizzes and write down 'England opening bat'"

Samuel was quite used to his erstwhile friend's flights of fancy and set himself to prove equal to any daydreams Richard could embark upon and so replied: "Yes, well, that's about as likely as being able to fit windows xp onto a 60 gig drive and expecting there to be no more than 12 gig utilized including, mind you, including mpegs, jpegs and all kinds of extraneous software."

Trevithick was lost. He was a 19th century engineer and all this talk of flat screen monitors and wireless networking was so far beyond him as to be indistinguishable from gobbledegook.

"PARTITIONS BOY" his employer shouted "Partitions, or failing that there was maybe more than one drive in the old PC."

Dawning light uncreased the frown recumbent on Trevithicks brow. "Computers." He beamed. "Now there's an idea for iw."

 

[Oblimo]

1) What OS were you running? If Windows, what version?

2) What are "personal" files? Were they in a special folder/directory? If so, have you found that special folder? Are those files in your My Documents folder in Windows XP, for example? If so, did you check "make these files private"?

We need information like that to provide help beyond educated guesses.