slaving a hard drive

dhight1980

A man I know recently had a S.M.A.R.T. error on his hard drive and he talked to Dell's tech support and they told him he needs a new hard drive and that the old one is shot. He wants me to install the new hard drive for him (which I have no problem doing). However, I would like to attempt to recover some pictures and other data he had on the old hard drive if possible. I know that S.M.A.R.T. errors sometimes come before the hard drive is unusable. Setting up the old drive as a slave drive seems to be the logical solution to try it but I need to know how to add a slaved drive without having to format the hard drive and if I should bother trying to slave it at all or is the data gone. I'm kind of new to the whole tech field so any instruction from all of you experts would really help.

thanks alot
dhight1980

jdog29

Make sure the jumper is set to slave or cable select and just hook it up to another computer. Make sure the drive is seen in the bios and boot windows. Find that hard drive and browse around there to find all data you want to save and back up. You can do this by copying it to the other master drive by putting it all in a folder and later burn it on an external hard drive, DVD, CD, or network drive. But I would think that by no means the data is gone. I think the data is fine for now and should be copied and backed up and then put back onto the new drive.

JDog29

TeKniques

Well it's worth a shot, but usually a SMART error means the drive is toast. Why not try and disable SMART in the BIOS while you slave the drive to see if you can get past it that way. Or maybe you can boot it as is while disabling SMART and try a backup from there.

Good luck.

RussS

Even though a SMART error usually means the drive is toast in many cases it is only the initial warning and you can click through and boot. However with what you are suggesting you have a much better chance of success as you are not booting to the drive and are putting a lighter load on the circuitry.

Note - if you have the drives set for cable select - remember that the Black connector is master and the Grey is Slave in most cases. If just slaving the drive remember to ensures that the main drive is set as Master and not CS as quite often that will cause a boot failure as well.