salvaging data from harddrive

[Campbellbrian]

Thanks in advance for any clues,
I have a PC at work that I need to salvage data from the harddrive.
The computer will not boot-up, but I would like some advice on placing
the harddrive into another PC to salvage the data. I would like the PC
that is working properly to use its existing boot sector from its
original harddrive, then naming the second drive something like G:\,
etc. These are old Win95 machines.

(on unrelated note, I have a WinME PC at home that apparently lost all
contents of the harddrive, so I reloaded the operating system and the
machine is back running, but is there a way to see if any files that
are apparently lost are REALLY lost? The 20Gb harddrive says that 17Gb
are free which is twice what I was used to seeing, so I'm assuming
that the files are gone... ? Would a defrag do anything?)

Thanks for any clues, Brian

 

[Mike Walsh]

Thanks in advance for any clues,
I have a PC at work that I need to salvage data from the harddrive.
The computer will not boot-up, but I would like some advice on placing
the harddrive into another PC to salvage the data. I would like the PC
that is working properly to use its existing boot sector from its
original harddrive, then naming the second drive something like G:\,
etc. These are old Win95 machines.

Set the jumper to slave and connect it to the same cable as your boot drive. The drive should appear as D.

(on unrelated note, I have a WinME PC at home that apparently lost all
contents of the harddrive, so I reloaded the operating system and the
machine is back running, but is there a way to see if any files that
are apparently lost are REALLY lost? The 20Gb harddrive says that 17Gb
are free which is twice what I was used to seeing, so I'm assuming
that the files are gone... ? Would a defrag do anything?)

You probably lost any chance of recovering any files when you reinstalled windows.