Primary SATA won't boot when IDE Slave laptop HDD is plugged into a PC

brandon02852

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Hello.

My friend gave me a supposedly dead laptop HDD to retrieve data from. I ordered the 2.5'' to 3.5'' IDE Adapter I needed and I am ready to go.

I connected everything and as soon as I turned on my desktop PC, I felt the laptop HDD vibrating in my hands (which means power is going to it) followed by a series of ticking noises (like tapping the tip of your fingernail on wood). I knew this was not good...

So I went into the BIOS and the laptop HDD was recognized as the Primary IDE Slave and my regular SATA HDD was set as SATA 1 and the one to boot off of. Perfect right?

Exiting the BIOS, the Windows XP loading screen appears, loads Windows and after the Boot Screen disappears, a blank screen shows up. I waited about 3 minutes for any action to appear before I determined it was not going to boot fully into Windows.

Hoping that my SATA HDD was not damaged, I powered down, unplugged the IDE HDD and booted up normally to write this message...



I have double and triple checked my connections from the laptop HDD to the motherboard and power is flowing to it fine.


For some reason the laptop HDD is causing my SATA not to fully boot. I have also tried booting into safe mode with no avail.



So is my friends laptop HDD dead? Is there any way to retrieve the data she wants off of it? I don't know so I am asking here for anyone who has any potential knowledge about this topic to respond.



PC SYSTEM SPECS

AMD Athlon 64x2 6400+ Black Edition
ASUS Crosshair Mainboard
4x1GB Kingston HyperX DDR2 800Mhz RAM
Radeon HD 4870
Antec Earthwatts 650W

LAPTOP HDD SPECS

Brand: Hitachi
Model: IC25N060ATMR04-0
Size: 60GB
Connection Type: ATA/IDE


Thank you very much,
Brandon
 
"Slave" has a very specific meaning for IDE drives - it means that the drive's jumper is set to be the "second" drive on an IDE cable. If this is the ONLY IDE drive on the cable, then the drive should be set to be a "Master". If there is another IDE drive on the cable (a DVD drive, for example), then one has to be set to "Master" and the other to "Slave".
 

brandon02852

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Sminlal

I did not know that. I read numerous video tutorials that said otherwise. I will try this. The HDD is the only drive on the cable.


vvhocare

This is not a USB connector. It is purely IDE. I have the boot device priority set accordingly.
 

brandon02852

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Sminlal

Setting the IDE drive to Master did not fix the problem. A black screen appears after the Windows XP boot screen finishes loading.

I also want to point out that when the IDE drive is plugged in going to the BIOS takes a lot longer...I do not know if this is because of the detection of the IDE drive...but it leads me to believe that Windows booting will take much longer than usual...

What are your ideas?

EDIT: Would I have to set jumpers on my SATA in order to get it to boot properly?
 
If your SATA drives are working fine without the IDE drive connected, then there's nothing you need to do with them. The SATA controller and it's drives are completely separate from the IDE controller and they should have no effect on each other.

I have to assume that the issue is that the "dead" IDE drive is causing problems when the devices are enumerated. I'd expect there would be a timeout for this sort of thing - you could try booting and just leaving the system alone for an extended period of time (maybe an hour) to see if it eventually comes up.

There's a small chance that there's a cable problem. You might try a different IDE cable to see if that helps. And it probably goes without saying, but as a sanity check you connected the drive's data cable AND power cable, right?

Failing that, the only other thing I could suggest is to get an external IDE enclosure that you could put the drive into. That should let you boot the system and THEN connect the drive. But based on what you've seen so far I strongly suspect that you won't be able to use it even that way.
 

brandon02852

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Yeah I connected the data cable and the power cable. Since the drive is being detected in the BIOS the cable isn't bad??? I will try a new cable...I have two 40-pin IDE cables...but the HDD has 39 pins. Are they compatible??

BTW the CD drive I use works great with the current IDE cable I am plugging into the HDD...so I doubt it is dead.

 
This seems to be a problem with Asus motherboards. I have the same issue with my 2 Asus motherboards and it not allowing you to have an IDE drive connected upon boot. I was unable to get the IDE drive to work at all. I had planned on switching to SATA's so I got forced into that. SCSI and every other type work fine but IDE it seems and Asus is no help or doesn't have a fix for it that I have seen/read.
 

brandon02852

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The boot priority is fine.

Windows XP loads and I hear the noise of my sound drivers being loaded...you know the click in your speakers...then after the boot screen things go black..

I am going to leave it on for a while and see if it decides to boot with it plugged in...

I can also try it on my pentium 4 computer this weekend. There are actually two other computers I can try this on. I'll get back to you guys if there are any new developments.