The middle grey connector is the slave connector. The black end connector is the Master.

The Master is the OS you are booting. The slave is the drive you are trying to access in order to retrieve data only.

If the Master is set to Cable Select then set the other to CS as well and then the cable will select.

Black end master middle grey slave.

Most all XPs are NTFS. Regardless NTFS can read FAT32.

ok, got it all reconnected and booted up to old pc with Gateway WestDig HD as a slave, with jumper in the slave poisiton and middle gray cable attached.
prior to boot up, Computer initially ran a check disk on drive E: recovery, said FAT32 and I missed the rest. After boot up, which was normal, computer found new hardware - drive D: the WD HD. Tried to open the files on Drive D: but received same message as yesterday, "The disk in drive D": not formatted, do you wish to format now?" I selected NO. and went to the device manager to check on the Hard disks.
Both state they are working properly. The master HD > C:drive HD is a Maxtor 40gb - and all is in this drive which appears to be a NTFS formatting?? can't confirm. The slave HD > D: is the WD 200gb, 190gb capacity, with 186,293 avail on the D: drive and 4470mb on the E: recovery drive. Does this mean the WD HD is FAT32 and thus can't be read by this computer? The drivers for both HDs are the same date- 7/1/2001, version 5.1.2535.0.

E: is the gateway recovery partition to return the gateway computer to factory settings.

There is nothing there that you want to read but yet again NTFS can read FAT but that is not an issue here.

What you want to read is D:

How is it listed under Disk Management?

right click My Computer then click Manage then Disk Management.

well jephree it doesn't look good
- C: NTFS Healthy (System) capacity 37.27GB, Free 26.57GB (71%) fault tolerance - No
- D: not noted as NTFS or FAT32 Healthy (Active) cap 181.93, Free 181.93 (100%) fault tolerance - No
- E: Fat32 Healthy cap 4.37GB Feee 1.46GB (33%) fault tolerance - No
based on this it looks like i somehow wiped it clean using defrag? or when it did its disk check repair?? UGH!

Is D: listed as "Basic"?

If yes see if you can change it to "Dynamic":

How To Convert to Basic and Dynamic Disks in Windows XP Professional

yes it says basic, but i don't have XP professional. I don't think i can do this, the info says "Dynamic disks are not supported on portable computers or Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" - XP media ctr is this HD's OS, the other HD is XP home edition and is the current master.

You could try finding an XP Pro machine. It was just an outside shot anyway.

Don't know what to say. You are being told there is no file system so there is nothing to read.

That doesn't mean everything is still not there. In fact it probably is there but Windows cannot read it as it cannot find a file system.

If the data was valuable you could go to a professional recovery service that might run into hundreds of dollars.

If you want to write it off put it back in the Gateway and run the recovery partition which should restore the original operating system. All data will be lost.

How you do this depends on the Gateway options. If you don't know nor have the manual let us know the exact Gateway model and we can look it up.

I have the Gateway recovery disk, but haven't loaded it - afraid it would definitely wipe it clean - this is a Gateway GT4010. I guess there may be other options on the recovery disk other than reformat??
I will try the Data Lifeguard Diagnostics CD or the other suggestion on this thread for Yet Another Tech Site suggesting UBUNTU to try and boot from this CD to recover the files.....we'll see....i'll post my results good or bad...roo

Originally Posted by jephree

If the data was valuable you could go to a professional recovery service that might run into hundreds of dollars.

Actually more if the HDD has to go into a "clean room"...the last quote we got was $1600 cdn to recover data.