kulwant, I suspect the answer is no. When you are dealing with a very old HDD that requires use of CHS addressing, that information is entered into and used by the BIOS code that operates the mobo's IDE port. However, an IDE drive connected via an adapter to a USB port does not use that interface, I believe. I doubt that the BIOS techniques for working with an IDE drive on a mobo IDE port can be redirected through a USB port. I suspect, instead, that the adapter contains a small IDE port controller chip and associated mini-I/O code that simplifies things by assuming that the drive plugged in is at least modern enough to use LBA addressing, and cannot use CHS addressing.
Your best bet to establish communication with that old IDE drive unit is to connect it to the IDE port of a mobo. Then you need to experiment a bit.
1. Before connecting and installing, set the jumper(s) on the back of the HDD. First find the label on the HDD for how to set the jumpers for Master or Slave or Master with No Slave Present or Master with Slave Present (not all of these will be listed). Next, read the label to find the HDD Parameters: Cylinder, Head, and Sector numbers (CHS) and often Pre-Comp and Landing Zone. Write these all down.
2. Now, how are you connecting to the mobo IDE port? The wide data cable normally has three connectors on it. The BLUE one on one end goes to the mobo port. The BLACK one on the other end goes to the Master drive unit. The GREY one in the middle goes to the Slave unit. There must always be one Master unit on an IDE port and cable, and there MAY be a Slave unit. (IF you are using both a HDD and an optical drive on one cable, it is best to set the HDD as Master and the optical as Slave on that port. SOME optical units did not work well as Masters.) So, if this old HDD is the only device on that IDE data ribbon, set its jumpers to the Master role and connect to the END of the ribbon cable. If it is the second device, probably set it to Slave and connect to the MIDDLE connector. Just make sure that the one on the end is set to Master. And, as above, if the other device is an optical unit, you might have to reverse that order and settings.
3. With the data ribbon and power connections done, close up and boot into BIOS Setup. There are three possible ways to set the BIOS to deal with this old unit.
(a) In the opening screen where the HDD's are configured, examine what it says about that old unit. By default normally it will be set to Automatically detect the HDD and its parameters, and it may have succeeded in doing that. So, see if the entries shown for C,H,S and others are correct, and if the HDD capacity in MB is correct. If yes, you are probably ready to proceed, so go to Step 4. If not, go to option (b).
(b) If the opening screen failed to detect properly, look near the end of the BIOS Setup screens for a menu item to Detect the Hard Drive. This is sometimes more thorough that the "automatic" system. You tell it exactly which drive unit you want checked, and then tell it to go ahead. It will return a display of Hard Disk Parameters, sometimes more than one set. Examine those carefully and, if one of them matches the data you copied from the HDD's label, tell it to use that parameter set. Now, go back to the opening screen and verify that the drive is using those parameters and shows the right capacity. If that's OK, go to Step 4.
(c) If you got here, the two detection systems failed. But you still have the label info. Go back to the opening screen and to the line for this old drive. Go to the Type entry field, which may already be set to "Auto". Now use the menu to change that to a number. Usually it will give you a list of 2-digit numbers to choose. Go to the end of the list and look for either the very last number or one called "User". Choose that and the drive's parameter line will now allow you to enter your own settings, rather that some pre-defined set. For each parameter, enter the data from the HDD label. When you get them in, the calculated capacity should match what the label said.
4. OK, now that you have the HDD type and its parameters set, make sure you SAVE and EXIT from BIOS Setup. The machine should boot, and that old HDD should show up in My Computer. Do NOT try to write anything to it! This is just in case the parameters were wrong. First, click on that drive and see if you can see its contents. If that works, look through it as much as you can to be sure all its data it available to you. If it is, then you are all ready to copy anything you want off it to another storage place. Do NOT write anything to that drive until AFTER you have read and copied everything you want from it.
If you cannot read data from the drive, there are two possible reasons:
A. You entered the wrong parameters and the OS cannot read the data properly. Review the HDD label and your entries in the BIOS screen to be sure. But even sometimes that is not enough. I once had a HDD that had been used with the wrong parameters, and I had no idea what parameters had been used. So I could not get any of its data off.
b. The old HDD actually has failed. This gets into one of two categories: either it has some corrupted data that makes it impossible for your current OS to read, OR it has a real hardware failure and cannot be used at all. Corrupted data MIGHT allow you to use a Data Recovery utility to read stuff off anyway and copy it to another drive unit. I won't discuss those details here. If the indications are a hardware failure, you might be able to confirm that using a HDD diagnostic utility you download from the website of the drive's manufacturer.
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