[LyrradMelon]

I have an old hard drive with windows 95 on it that will only launch in safe mode. I need to copy some data off it but i cant connect it and my new hard drive (running windows XP) to the computer at the same time because the computer gets confused with which one to launch. The easiest would be if i could just connect the two, so if there is a way to do that please let me know.
I have tried running a few linux live distros but because they are live, I can't copy data off of the drives. Thanks for any help that you have to offer.

 

[JohnWill]

I'm at a loss as to why the computer gets confused, I do this all the time. You could pick up a USB external case and stick the drive into that if for some reason you can't get it working internally.

I'd connect the old drive to the secondary channel, remove the CD/DVD drives temporarily for the copy.

 

[LyrradMelon]

Ya I don't understand why it doesn't just boot off the primary drive either. On boot it tells me to insert an operating medium and press any key to continue. But i solved the problem a bit by using floppy discs to copy the very important files off when I was in safe mode.
I will try disconnecting the disc drives, because I already have the old drive on the secondary line.


**Working**
Not sure why but when i had it connected on the same line as the CD drive, it wouldn't boot. After disconnecting the CD drive it worked perfectly. Thanks for the tip.

 

[crjdriver]

It is probably because you had both devices set as the master device. When you have two devices on a single ide channel, one must be the master and one the slave. This is done with jumpers either M/S or CS [cable select]

 

[LyrradMelon]

An additional question. This drive is so old that it has documents made with wordpad 1.0. These won't open with anything I have, is there a way to open these without finding and installing wordpad 1.0? The file type is WDB

 

[Rich-M]

If this is a pc with sata drives and you stick in an ide drive, I struggle with this all the time where they want to boot to the ide drive if present.