I'm not trying to pull any data off these drives, I just want to be able to use them/play around with them, but I don't wanna have to hook up the test server I have, there's alot of parts involved and until I get my house set up right, I don't want to have it in the way. Does anyone know of a USB/Firewire drive controller that can access older drives like this (or allow you to set the head/cylinder/sector info inside of a program or something?) Something like this has to exist. I knew aboout older drives needing head/cylinder/sector info set manually, but I was unsure if it even applied in this instance. I've managed to pull data from ancient IDE drives (varying sizes, oldest being 85MB). Most modern systems still offer that sort of functionality. The tl dr of this is: glad you got it sorted - however just because you figured it out quickly doesn't mean all the stuff you read is any different than what you just posted.ĭisclaimer: it has been almost 20 years since I knew these things and I didn't know them incredibly clearly then, the computing world and standard were still very raw back then, so what I said above may not be 100% correct.Jimmsta wrote:Older drives that are generally 540MB or less need to be directly connected to an IDE connector, and usually need to be configured according to the Cylinder/Head/Sector information printed on the top of the hard drive in the BIOS of the computer. So that added another complication in troubleshooting things. What further complicated things was once you hit ATA-66 you needed 80 wire cables vs 40, those ribbons were fragile and easy to get connection problems in them if they got bent too much. So yes, there was a lot of confusion and a lot of people didn't want to screw with jumpers so things were difficult - the only real way was to jumper appropriately and skip cable select all together. So as a result you get people that post what worked for them, but the problem with that is while it probably did work for them, they often didn't give any details on what the exact hardware/chipsets were that they were running.
There seemed to be various ways boards dealt with Cable Select (CS) and incorrectly jumpered drives. Really the ONLY sure fire way to make IDE work even on IDE only boards (pre SATA) was to force Master and Slave jumpers correctly. But there reason there is so much "gobbley-gook" is because IDE stuff is confusing to people that didn't "grow up" with it. XboxHDM v1.9 (Scrow down to download it) Kingroachs NDURE 3.0 (Scrow down to download it) or go here NDURE 3.0.
ISO Recorder v2 (Or any other program to burn ISOs to cds) WinRAR or the very awesome and free 7-zip.
Joe Lunchpail - I don't know your background or age and it is dangerous to make assumptions, so my apologies if I'm totally wrong here. Desktop PC with an ATA connection NOT SATA. It's arithmetic!Ĭlick to expand.Apologies for bumping this again after a month and a half, but hey its not as bad as bumping it after 5.5 years. Too many people just have to complicate things. It took me all of 10 minutes after laughing my head off for 2 hours reading all the gobbley-gook all over the Internet.
Here's what I did & it's easy-peasy!Ģ: take jumper off of the IDE HD and put it somewhere that you're sure to forget aboutģ: Plug the IDE HD into the connection in middle of ribbon cable (don't forget the power!)Ĥ: Boot computer & go into BIOS>BOOT Make sure the SATA is the 1st to boot with the HDs (My sequence is: DVD, USB, SATA, IDEĦ: Enjoy (after Windows installs the new driver for the IDE HD & asks you to reboot)ħ: I repeat. That's it! SATA is my boot drive (C & my DVD is Master on the IDE(0)-End plug.
I already had a pretty good idea about how to do it but I like checking. I checked all over the 'Net and all I found was a bunch of people who need a life & who tried to dazzle me with BS or baffle me with their brilliance. Hey there: I too wanted to simply add an old IDE HDD I had laying around just for storage.