not seeing second hard drive

[franko]

My daughters old Dell 8200 desktop quit - we dont know what happened
but we suspect she left it on during a thunderstorm and perhaps there
was a tremendous jolt that the surge protector couldn't handle - not
sure though. The original symptom was 'it's dead' - no fan, no hum, no
beep, no led, no boot to bios, nothing at all...dead.

My suspicion was the psuu so i connected a known good one which
provided power to the mb (fan worked but still no beeps, no booting,
no anything). So then I reseated all the cards and all the memory
sticks. Nothing. I exchanged the display card. Nothing.Removed the
heatsink and reseated the cpu . Nothing.

We accepted that the computer is probabbly toast but wanted to try and
recover some data

Then I took the hard drive (an old 40gb ATA) out and installed it in
another computer as a second (slave) drive. It was tough to get the
machine to boot but I moved the master/slave jumpers around a little
on both hd 's and eventually got past the bios etc to Windows. Problem
is that this 2nd hard drive isnt seen by windows XP (via My Computer
or Windows Explorer). I guess usually one has to format it to be seen
but of course I cant do that.

Is there a solution?
Alternatively I thought of maybe buying an enclosure and trying to
read it via a USB connection as an external.
Thanks for any help to read the drive to enable some data recovery

F

 

[franko]

I'm afraid I know ziltch about laptops but I know desktop mobo's
have a small battery. (Round camera type). The symptom's you describe,
no power, may be rectified by simply changing this battery. I have
done this in the past. Would be a fairly cheap diagnostic test anyway.
The other problem your having, no drive showing up, is a problem
I'm having right now. See my post (above yours): "Diskpart help". You
can check the BIOS of the working computer to see if it's recognized,
then check Disk Management, then Diskpart if needed. If these
utilities see the disk then you'll be in the same boat with me! You
may, however, be able to use Disk Mgmt. to rescan the drives, or,
assign a drive letter. Unfortunately for me, DM dosen't give me these
options. (Grayed out).

the Bios sees both drives but WinXP doesnt