pc won't start with old hdd connected

[je1983]

My old HDD failed last week, heard some occasional light clicking and pc would not recognize it but on the F2 setup screen it still shows up. Actually it had been acting up for the past 18 months or so but somehow kept going until last week.

I've since replaced the main drive with a new one and everything is running smoothly. I was hoping I could try to attempt some kind of access to the old drive, partly because I have a weeks worth of unimportant files I had not backed up, and also just to see if I can. I did the same thing with my old drive around 10 years ago and I was able to recover my old files and actually had the clicking drive run as a backup for some months before it really died.


Getting back to my current situation, I have connected the old drive to my motherboard using the space being occupied by my 3tb backup drive. When I try to start it freezes at the win 7 startup page. The first time it started up it clicked randomly but after my second and third restart there was no noise at all.
Bios recognizes the old drive, I turned it off and made sure the boot sequence starts up with the new drive but I still can't seem to get past the windows loading screen.

 

[kanewolf]

I would try it with a USB to SATA adapter rather than a direct connect.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there je1983,

I would totally agree with kanewolf. You can attach the drive externally and see if you will be able to access it right away, in order to retrieve the data. If this does not work, you can use some data recovery tool.
Another thing you can try is to boot up Ubuntu from a flash drive or a CD and see whether this would work out: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/267999-32-recover-data-mode
Sometimes, Ubuntu handles failing drives well.

As for using the drive, I think that it is in a poor condition and it can fail at any time. You can test it with a tool that will provide a SMART report. This would show what is wrong with it.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD

 

[je1983]

Thanks guys. I did attempt to connect it directly again yesterday which led to all sorts of issues and have only just got my pc to work.

I guess I'll be going ahead with getting an external sata to usb adapter.

Could I ask if there are other advantages of using a usb adapter rather than directly connecting it to the pc apart from not having to boot up everytime I try to connect it. I always thought a direct connect would be better due to the faster sata speeds. Does the computer access the drive in a different manner when it's connected via usb?

 

[kanewolf]

It is faster to direct connect, BUT it has less protection. Since you are having problems, the USB to SATA provides a buffer.

 

[akseli]

Generally two things could be happening.

Either in bios it's configured to try booting from the old disk as first, so in case it's connected, it will attempt, and fail. Assuming you set bios correctly to boot from the new drive, this should not be the problem.

Second, it's possible a physically faulty disk can prevent Windows booting from intact disk. During loading of drivers and such it will check the drive for partition table and formatted partitions and load them if it finds any, and it can get stuck in this phase if the drive doesn't work well. Sollution, boot first, then connect the drive after Windows has fully loaded. When fully loaded Windows is much more fault tolerant and you might be able to access the disk on some level. It might require third party tools to dig anything useful from the drive.

Since sata II all motherboards and drives have supported hot swap, so you can just connect the power to the drive after Windows has loaded. If you have one, the said USB adapters can help, sometimes they might be able to bypass problems with drive.