Hi, I went to use my computer this morning and the screen was blank. I powered down and after powering back up, it hangs up with " detecting IDE Devices". I have an identical computer so I swapped hard drives and the problem moved to the other computer. Of course, there is some data on the hard drive that I do not have backed up. What are my options? I have not tried anything yet in fear of losing data. Thanks for any help in advance. RD

Install the drive as a slave and see if it is detected.

If so you should be able to access the data.

If not is it seen by the BIOS?

I installed as a slave and it was still not detected. The computer still gave the same result "Detecting IDE devices" and hangs there. I then unplugged the slave(bad hard drive) and powered the computer up with the good master and added the slave after it was booted. I restarted the system without powering down and that allowed me to go into setup and if I checked it correctly, it is also not seen by the BIOS.

RD

Just to clarify:

You should have the good drive as Master. The problem drive as slave.

Verify the jumpers. Do not make these or any internal changes with the computer on.

Reboot with this setup.

If the BIOS does not detect the drive there is not much left outside of Professional recovery which will be quite costly. They would remove the disks in order to extract the data.

I figuerd so. I did have jumpers correct. BIOS does not detect.
Thanks, RD