[Jitter]

I am trying to retrieve data off a laptop HD. The laptop died and the person doesnt really want to be bothered w/ it, but wants the info off the drive. I bought a 2.5" adapter to standard IDE, and am trying to slave the drive. I looked up the manual and checked out the jumper placements to slave it, but when i goto boot up I get disk boot failure, please insert system disk. It seems like my PC is trying to boot off the laptop HD instead of my regular HD. I have slaved regular HDs w/o a problem before so I am at a loss as to why this isnt working. Would anything else besides the PC trying to boot off the laptop drive give me the disk boot failure error? As soon as i disconnect the drive my PC boots up fine. I was thinking about trying the cable select jumper, but I am not exactly sure what that does.

Thanks for the help

Kevin

[MiDKnYtE]

don't use any jumpers. just connect the drive to the secondary ide on a cable by itself.

[Jitter]

The IDE cable my HD on is now has 2 connects for drives, and my other IDE cable has 2 connects for my CD and DVD drive. Are you saying to disconnect my CD or dvd drive, and just hook up the laptop HD to that w/o any jumpers? I will have to double check which cable is primary or secondary IDE.

[Jitter]

In think I tried every possible cable/jumper position w/o any luck. The drive constantly makes a whirring noise and a dull clikcing noise about every half second. The bios or windows isnt detcting it. I tried going into the bios and selected user type HDD and matched the heads/cylinders etc etc but that didnt work either. It seems like whichever IDE controller i put it on it fails. If I put it on my primary IDE channel as a slave i get a disk boot failure. If I put it on the secondary IDE as either a master or slave, my CD or dvd drive doesnt work but I can boot up. If I put it on the secondary IDE alone as a master or slave I can boot up, but the drive isnt getting detected.

[MiDKnYtE]

sounds like a bad drive.