New Hard Drive vs. Old Hard Drive

[Guest]

Hi All,
I'm working with a Dell 4700 and Windows XP/2 OS. Had to replace original
(corrupted) hard drive with a brand new one. Had our PC Guru install the new
drive and completely reinstall Windows XP/2. Since I was unable to fetch
several important files from the damaged drive (prior to the reinstall) .. I
asked the Guru to keep the Old Drive on my PC .. hoping to gain access to it
at a later date. He has both drives installed independant of each other (New
Drive is "0"; Old Drive is "1"). He told me to go into setup (F2) as system
is booting up. Turn new drive OFF .. Turn old drive ON; Save and exit. Now my
problem is trying to quit the "defrag" (senses corrupt files) when PC boots
up onto the old drive. How can I stop the "defrag" and go directly to my old
drive files? Any suggestions greatly appreciated. Thanks .. and have a Grand
Day .. Helen Marie

 

[peter]

Boot up with the old drive
Open Windows Explorer and see if the old drive is listed....drive letter?
if it is you should be able to access and copy your personal files to the
new drive.
Once you have everything off the old drive that you need try going to
Administrative Tools/Computer management./disk drfragmenter
and see if the drive will defrag or better still format under Disk
Management
peter

 

[Guest]

If the old drive is faulty I'd definitely not leave it in. I've seen a case
where a faulty disk corrupted another on the same bus (and that was on a SCSI
server) - if the IDE interface of the old disk goes completely bad it could
trash the contents of your new disk.

A safer approach woudl be to use a USB disk-box.