If I understand correctly, you have a hard drive from the old machine that may contain retrievable data.

If this is the case, then a newly-built system with a new hard drive is a perfect place to put your old hard drive -- as a non-booting data drive.   While I may open up performance issues discussion, let's ignore those pitfalls for now and hook up the old hard drive temporarily for data retrieval and sector repair purposes.

It's easiest to hook up the drive to the secondary IDE channel by itself or in the same way it was in the original system (ie: if CD was on same channel, set CD for slave and chain the old drive with new CD, etc.).  Rather than wrestling with master/slave jumpering which sometimes requires a visit to the manufacturer's website in order to decipher the jumper settings, I find it's easier for temporary data retrieval purposes to hook the old drive up to the second channel alone as master, copy the data from Windows Explorer shut down the computer, remove old drive, re-attach new drives that may have been temporarily un-attached and restart.

When an older drive is hooked up to a working system, you can repair it or have a good chance at retrieving your data using many of the utilities available today.  I've repaired sectors with WinXP's scandisk and have been able to copy pictures and other data to the new drive.

 --gary r. tennesen
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