Have a old HD I want to read. Need to get the pictures off of it. It is SATA. Pluggged it into my pc, after disconnecting my main HD, but it asks to boot from CD/ROM. I don't have a cd for that HD. What can I do to successfully read it? Thanks.
Your computer can't boot without your main HDD plugged in because that is where Windows is installed. Do you have another SATA cable and power supply cable to hook the old HDD up? If so, rehook your main HDD up to where it was plugged into before and then use another available SATA port to hook up the old HDD. Windows should install the proper driver for and you should be able to copy files from it.
If you don't have another SATA and power cable, then another option would be to download a Linux Distro and create a live CD, which you can boot up into from your DVD and/or CD drive and transfer the files from the old drive.
Yes I do have another SATA cable and power supply cable. I'll try it later on, thanks for the info.
Finally got a chance to try it. Looks like on start up, it identified the second HD, but it was stuck on the windows start up screen. (windows is starting up) Thanks
Are you saying that Windows hangs at startup with the old drive plugged into another SATA port, or did it finally boot? I wasn't sure from your last post.
"Windows hangs at startup with the old drive plugged into another SATA port"........Bingo, yep.
The only other thing I can think of is if you have another Windows installation on the old HDD. That might cause it not to boot. You don't happen to have, or know someone who has an external USB HDD enclosure, or HDD dock? With USB you could then plug in the drive after Windows has booted and see if it works. Another option who could try is to download a Linux distro, like Ubuntu or Mint, and burn it DVD. With that, you can boot up Linux from your DVD drive and see if it will recognize the old HDD. If so, you could copy the files to your new HDD.
Another Linux distro I just thought of is called Puppy Linux. It is small and designed to be run from either live CD, or flash drive.
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