No "slave" setting on hard drive

[courtney01]

I'm using a Western Digital Caviar Green hard drive and it just failed on me. I'm trying to recover data from it by connecting it to another computer as a slave, but when I looked at the back, there's no jumper on it and no indication of master and slave configurations.

The diagram is available at the bottom of http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1679&p_created=#jumper.

How can I make this a slave drive?

 

[Blue Fox]

There is no such thing with SATA. Each drive resides on its own channel.

 

[courtney01]

So if I just connect it to my computer, it should just detect it as an additional drive? This hard drive has an OS installed on it, so how does the computer know not to boot from this drive?

 

[OmegaAvenger]

SATA ports are individually labebled, 1 cable per drive. Drive 0 (or 1 depending on your motherboard) is usually the default boot device unless you define it as something else in the BIOS.

 

[courtney01]

Thanks. I tried connecting it, and my entire system doesn't boot up anymore. Will adding a malfunctioning hard drive prevent the primary OS hard drive to fail to boot up too? I added the failing hard drive via esata.

 

[OmegaAvenger]

Thanks. I tried connecting it, and my entire system doesn't boot up anymore. Will adding a malfunctioning hard drive prevent the primary OS hard drive to fail to boot up too? I added the failing hard drive via esata.

I have seen that yes. Since your using esata, boot the system up then plug it in.

 

[SicKlown42012]

You might have to go into the BIOS and select the drive order. I've had an issue where a hardware change messed with my boot order, and caused the symptoms you're reporting.

 

[courtney01]

I have seen that yes. Since your using esata, boot the system up then plug it in.

So esata is something you can connect and disconnect while the computer is turned on, like usb?

You might have to go into the BIOS and select the drive order. I've had an issue where a hardware change messed with my boot order, and caused the symptoms you're reporting.

I'll try this and give an update

 

[courtney01]

I tried connecting it via esata after booting it up, so the boot issue isn't a problem anymore. But my computer doesn't recognize the hard drive. I don't even think I hear the hard drive spinning, although when I first connected it, it gave several intermittent buzzing sounds and then became silent.

 

[Little_4nic8er]

Look in the Disk Manager and see if the drive is online or offline. If offline, right click the box the disks label is on (Disk 0, Disk 1, etc.) not the partition part and select online.

 

[J-Will]

How do you plan on 'recovering data'? You could also try booting to a CD such as TinyXP or any of the various versions of Linux on CD, and having both HDDs plugged in during POST. Most of thost OS's on CD will have disk management functions, or at the very least have the ability to copy and paste files from one drive to the other.

 

[danman]

I have seen that yes. Since your using esata, boot the system up then plug it in.

That only works if your set to AHCI and not IDE.

 

[dustNbone]

Also maybe a stupid question but you do have power supplied to the drive right?

Dustin

 

[Deads0uls]

You might also need to re-scan disks. IIRC, you can right click "Disk Management" in the tree view on the left of the Computer Management MMC and select "Rescan disks".

That is usually required when I turn on my SATA connected backup drive.

 

[OmegaAvenger]

That only works if your set to AHCI and not IDE.

True, but I once had a motherboard that supported adding drives on the IDE bus while it was online.. not so much removing them though. It was an IBM workstation though.