Take the cases off of two computers, set them close together back to
front,with the motherboards facing each other.

On the GOOD pc, take the cdrom ribbon cable off of the cdrom.  (I am
assuming the good pc has one ribbon cable for the hard drive or drives
connecting them to the motherboard, and one ribbon cable for the
cdrom/dvd/cdrw, and the cdrom is NOT the slave on the hard drive.  If this
is true, then the cdrom ribbon cable should be the secondary ide channel.)

Put the ribbon cable you just removed from the cdrom and connect it to the
hard drive in the BAD pc.  It should easily reach if the computers are side
by side.

Turn the bad pc on.  It will stop with an error that the boot files or drive
is missing.  This is fine.  We only want the bad pc powered on to provide 12
volt power to the disk drive.

Turn on the good pc.  Press DEL to enter cmos setup.  Under primary setup,
check that the secondary ide channel master is set to auto.  If not, move
the cursor there and use the page up key to change it to auto.  This will
allow the hard drive in the bad pc to be recognised in place of the cdrom.
Save and exit cmos.

When windows starts, there will be no complaints about the cdrom.  Instead
the cdrom drive letter will now be a hard disk.  No matter how many one hard
drive letters in windows you had before, the drive from the bad pc will be
D:, because it is an active partition, and the 2nd active partition in a
system is always assigned D:
Now just use windows explorer to move or copy any files you want from D: to
C:.

Shut down the good pc, then power off the bad pc.  It may be easiest just to
shut off the surge suppressor, or you can try holding in the power button
for 5 or more seconds.

Replace the ribbon cables to their original positions.  Make sure the red
stripe on the ribbon cables in both the good and bad computers is facing the
same direction it was when you removed it.

You should not have to adjust cmos again.  If it was originally set to
CDROM, or to disable, it only effects the amount of time it takes to boot,
and it will boot fine and recognise the cdrom if it is left set to auto.

When ME starts again on the good pc, the hardware wizard should start, and
new hardware found and installed.  This is the cdrom/dvd/cdrw being
recognised again.

Provided the good pc is not already using a hard drive on the secondary ide
channel, this saves the hassle of removing drives from mounting bays, and
moving around master/slave jumpers.
Tom Turak

-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Elmers [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, May 18, 2002 3:08 PM

I have a computer that has quit responding. I try and
reload WinME and each time I get the blue screen of
death just prior to the machine rebooting.
I can access the C:\ drive using a boot disk and would
like to transfer some of the data to another computer
before formatting or installing a new hard drive.
Transferring the data, I would like to do it faster than
using file-split and a floppy if possible.

                         PCSOFT's List Owner's:
                      Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
                       Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>