I have an old Quantum Fireball 1280MB AT drive from my adopted Granddad's old PC that he has some photos on he would like to recover. The drive has a label on it saying PRE FIS DRIVE, and it was running Windows 95.

I have tried to set it up as a slave on my XP system and it causes the boot up to hang. Have tried various configurations but without luck.

I've had a few quotes from professional recovery companies and they vary between £295 and £650!

I'd love to be able to give him a CD with all the pictures on but that is way out of my price range.

Anyone help with any suggestions?

HTC.

Check the settings on the drive, and make sure its set to slave. There should be a row of pins near the cable connection. on top of the drive case should be a diagram showing how yo put a jumper for slave setting.

First of all I would suggest placing it as the master on the secondary IDE channel and removing any other devices on that channel. Use a single device IDE ribbon cable if you have it.

It's a relatively recent disk even though it's only 1 GB, and supports PIO mode 4 and DMA mode 2.

It supports both LBA and extended CHS, so should be recognised correctly.

For reference, here's the parameters in case you have to input them manually in the BIOS (rather than use autodetect):

MODEL (FIREBALL SERIES) SIZE CYL HDS SECT WPCOMP LZONE TYPE
FIREBALL 1280 1280 MB 2484 16 63 65535 2484 IDE

Here's (http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/hard-drives-hdd/quantum/FIREBALL-640AT-642MB-3-5-SL-ATA2-FAST.html) a reference with the jumper config if you haven't got it.
SD

Thanks for the ideas.

I tried have set the jumpers as a slave and also tried to set it on the secondary IDE channel as the master but still no luck.

I'm thinking maybe the drive is faulty? :(

W.

You can buy enclosures to put old hard drives in that then plug into your computer via USB. I wonder if that might work.

e.g.

SATA Hard Drive USB Docking Station > Maplin (http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=222999)

or more likely

3.5? IDE / SATA USB 2.0 Combo Enclosure > Maplin (http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?moduleno=48213)

I had an issue once with an old drive I wanted to use as a secondary HD. Boot would hang with the old drive connected. Turned out that the old drive still had the active flag set on the OS partition (winxp) which was also the case for the primary drive. I used a partition editing tool to remove the active flag on the old drive and that solved the problem.

Maybe it was a BIOS problem, or maybe a WinXP problem. Either way, it required resetting the flag. Possibly a more modern BIOS wouldn't be phased.

Good thing its not an ST-506!

:ok:

I had a similar (i think) issue with a 13 YR old HDD...

I got it to show, after a some issues in the BIOS, but refused to show in Windows...

I had a linux live CD, which can be downloaded from many places, and booted into Linux, coppied from the old HDD to the new one, and job done.

The HDD could have physical damage, but i am lead to belive that a fair few things that go wrong with HDD's have temp fix's, but just what i have read on some data recovery blogs.