Recovering Data from an IDE drive?

Hey there Toms!

My father, who gave me my love of computers, worked in the IT industry.

Turns out he wasn't as good at computers as I always thought, due to his drug use.'

The latest mistake of his that I have to fix stems from when my mother's computer was upgraded.

The computer she upgraded to was a prebuilt that had no room nor accommodation for an IDE Master / Slave combo.

My father went through and took the data from those drives and put them on my mother's computer, but he failed to put the decades worth of photos on her hard drive, and deleted the recovered files soon after.

My mother expressed a wish for the photos, as they're my entire childhood, so I went to throw the drives in my computer and pull the photos off.

Turns out my father, in his infinite wisdom, had used Ctl+X rather than just copying the files over, so they aren't accessible through file explorer.

I happen to know the data hasn't been written over, because they've been sitting in my dorm this entire time. (My computer still can use IDE drives.)

So here's my question...

How do you recover data from an IDE drive? Will a normal program made for a SATA drive suffice? Will it matter that the drives are in a master / slave combo?
 
Solution
The connection to your machine shouldn't affect a data recovery program, as long as the machine can see the drives the recovery program should be able to attempt to recover the data. Master/Slave doesn't matter as long as you have them setup properly so your computer can access the drives.

recuva is a free recovery program, that's worth trying.

tomatthe

Distinguished
The connection to your machine shouldn't affect a data recovery program, as long as the machine can see the drives the recovery program should be able to attempt to recover the data. Master/Slave doesn't matter as long as you have them setup properly so your computer can access the drives.

recuva is a free recovery program, that's worth trying.
 
Solution
Alright, thanks! I'm a little fuzzy on tech that was invented before I was born, so I wasn't sure if the internal mechanics worked the same way.

I'm fairly sure they're set up properly - if they aren't, would it be possible to recover from them one-by-one?