[RESOLVED] non-dos formatted hard drive

My brother has an old pentium 90mhz pc with an 1.2 gig west digital hard drive. recently his video went out (he does not have a card his video is built on his motherboard). He decided that he wanted to take his hard drive out of this older pc and add it as a slave to a newer pc that he purchased.The info that he has on his older hard drive is not replacable and is very important to him. He took it to the shop and the tech told him they could not retrive his data off his old hard drive because it is a non-dos formatted hard drive.
I find it hard to believe that a hard drive that is still in working condition is unusable. I've installed plenty of hard drives put I'm not a pro by any means, so i'm wondering if there's any logic to the tech's non-solution.And is there any service or program that can help my brother get back some very important info.

What was the drive formatted on? there should be some way to retrieve it, even if he was running NTFS or ext2...what operating system was he running on the old machine? what about the new one?

I have my self installed an additional H.D. out of my stack that still had windows on it. It went in as slave on the primary controller. Started right up and all of the windows files and directories still there. It shouldn't hurt to atempt to install it and access it just as long as you do not fdisk or format. It may or may not work. I dunno but it's worth a try. The most that could go bad is that windows would not let you access the drive but should still see the drive itself.

somebody correct me if I am wrong.

Thanks

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Sniff...Smell that..... That's what a roach smells like after he made his home your computer... and fried.

It probably had drive overlay software on it - like EZ Drive.

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Paint your old laptop!

1.Probably brother's hard disk catch virus from first HDD. Try to use antivirus soft.

2.Also first (boot)HDD could content some of boot managers like System Commander - it's kills any system on connected second drive. In this case You can use NDD with key "rebuild". All partition will be restored,except for drive C: - it will be lost at all,sorry.
Another way - try to use Partition Magic for fixing this problem.
3.Agree with moderator - it's may be also drive overlay issue (Ontrack Disk Manager, EZ Drive etc.)
But I'd rather assume, what only virus in MBR cause this problem.


[This message has been edited by Ruslan (edited October 06, 2000).]

Hey why not install another video card into his system and disable the onboard video card using the jumper ( I hope you have the manuel )
If there is no jumper then maybe the video os self disbling when another video card is inseterted
this way he can get back into the drive and save his data

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Format c:( I'm givin er all she's got cap'in !!! )