rkoenn
Senior member
I was in the process of upgrading and old Dell for a friend. It was Pentium 4 era and has a 40GB Seagate PATA drive in it. The machine was running and booting to XP fine although very slow. I duplicated the drive onto a WD 1GB with the new hardware, an AMD FM2 integrated system. I couldn't get a good boot so installed XP clean and all is fine. However, I was going to go back and get all his data off the old Seagate so first tried to attach it to the new machine using a PCI express PATA adapter. The new machine detected the drive OK but it is not assigned a drive letter. Also, using disk manager it says the drive has not been initiated. I then attached it to my personal Intel quad machine and got a similar message. I did nothing with the drive from when I duped it until I tried attaching it to the upgraded machine. Finally in desperation I assembled the old parts on the bench with the old drive basically as received. Now it refuses to boot although the drive is recognized. So I'm not sure what has happened. It could be a freak coincidental failure but that seems odd. Could the PCIEx adapter have done something to the drive tables? Is there anything I can possibly do to recover the data? I have done nothing other than attaching the drive so far. HELP!!!!
