Norm Start wrote:
> My old computer crashed. It was a P-III with Windows XP
> Professional
> SP3 which was running quite well. Then when I came back the
> monitor
> was blank but some normal noise was still coming from the case.
> I
> shut it down and looked inside the case. There were little
> flakes of
> gold solder, some little jumper plugs with plastic handles and
> quite
> a few little silver solder particles at the bottom of the case.
> Tried
> to re-start it but only could get some hard drive spinning and
> some
> beeps from the case. I think the mainboard burned or shorted
> out from
> the dust and ant carcasses.
>
> I think I might be able to get the data from the hard drive
> because it
> seems to make normal noise and nothing seems burned or smoked.
> I hope
> I can. It is a Western Digital 120 gigabyte 7200 RPM model. I
> hope I
> can remove it, put it in a spare slot in a newer computer and
> save
> the data files. Perhaps I can use it for storage?
>
> Is this so? How should I set it with its jumper pins? Can
> someone who
> has done this provide some help and ideas?
>
You're headed in the right direction. But here are a few points
you have to check.
The 120GB hard drive must be an IDE (also called PATA) drive. If
your other computer is fairly new, the motherboard may have only
one IDE port (instead of two on older boards) to which you can
connect two IDE devices. If you have only one device - perhaps a
DVD writer - connected to that IDE cable, then yes, you can
attach your old 120GB drive to it.
Re the jumper: When you attach two drives to a single IDE cable,
one of them has to be Master and the other Slave. There are two
ways of doing this. You can use jumpers to set one as Master and
the other as Slave. Or you can set the jumpers on both drives to
"Cable select" and which one is Master or Slave will be
automatically determined by their position on the cable. Jumper
positions are usually marked on the drives.
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