by PCHeintz72 » Thu Nov 06, 2014 5:56 pm
Most IDE drives have the exact same combinations of jumper pins... normally configured in two rows of three.
Normally the configuration pattern is actually pictured right on the drive itself.
If it is set wrong, it generally does not get recognized correctly, or at all. And could well be the cause of what you are experiencing.
The options are almost always the same: single drive, slave, master, and CSEL.
- Slave is always when have two drives and system needs to know which has priority.
- CSEL is normally a reserved diagnostic mode, and practically never used in a standard computer. I have seen some external drive enclosures want it.
- Master and Single drive are almost always the same functionality if only one drive present, but master is used in two drive setups to indicate which has priority.
I could picture a enclosure wanting single drive operation, master operation, and CSEL, but generally not slave, as slave is specifically for if there is another IDE device in the chain, impossible in a single enclosure.
There are other possibilities as to the problem, but none of them too good for you:
- boot sector 0 could have become corrupted, which would cause what you are experiencing. If this occurred the drive may be beginning to go, or it could merely need a reformatting and it will be fine. Reformatting of course would kill the data.
- on an old drive the drive orientation could be important, possibly tilting the drive to be the same orientation might allow recognition.
- IDE drives, except old ones, when properly powered down, 'auto park', this means it moves the head away form the platters, if that did *not* happen, it is possible you've had or caused a physical crash of data, in which case the drive is likely toast.
- you mentioned the drive as being from a XP system. if using it on another XP or newer system you should have been fine with the exception of probably not being able to access the locked down user profiles. if using it on a older systm, like Windows 2000 (extremely unlikely), you would have had issues similar to what you are reporting, because 2000 and XP and 7 all use different versions of NTFS, each newer version has increased security.
- a incompatibility with the enclosure and drive. this could occur for example if the drive was too large for the enclosure (was common for a while when people were putting 160gb+ drives in early enclosures that only supported up to 120gb), and going back quite some time there was issues at 8gb and 32gb drives.
- If you have not already, try it in a different computer. Could be the enclosure does not like the system.
- if the drive was sitting unused for a long time, it is possible the heads are seized up. That would allow the drive to be seen but not accessed.
Sadly... that is about the limit of knowledge I could give. I could try a whole bunch of things if I had it in front of me, but not so much remotely like this.