Hard drive recovery?

[r896neo]

Last week windows XP kindly announced that he was shutting down mid program. On attempted restart i got the message windows could not start as file xyz was corrupted or missing. Booting from the CD didnt even work.

I needed the computer the next week so tried to run a program i borrowed from a mate called spin rite which attempted to examine the HD surface and rewrite bad sectors etc. It found a couple of unrecoverable sectors and then upped its est run time to 58 hrs then crashed not long after.

As i needed the comp i ran out bought a new SATA HD and reinstalled windows and the program i need this week. All working fine but obviuously i'd like to recover as much as possible off the old drive.

I'm no expert so was wondering can i simply plug in the old drive as a slave? If i did what would happen? basically what do i do now to recover data from the old drive?
Cheers

 

[Spark123]

Write 100 times - I must back up my important data

There isn't a master/slave setting the same as an IDE a SATA drive, it is just a case of plugging it into another SATA socket on your PC, plug a power cabe in, detect it in bios and boot windows, then hope for the best.
If you don't have a spare SATA socket on the M/B then you can get a USB device which will plug into the hard disk, if doing it this way it should just be a case of plugging it in.

 

[r896neo]

hey spark thanks for your reply, I'm not sure i understand exactly? Are you saying i need to boot windows from it to access it? Because that is why i got the new drive because even with the CD i could not boot windows from the damaged drive?

I have serious fundamental gaps in my knowledge though so if I dont get what you are saying, i'm sorry.

Could you break it down into steps??
Thanks in advance

 

[Spark123]

I doubt you will be able to boot windows from the damaged drive. You have 2 options if you want to access your damaged drive, fit it in your PC or buy a USB converter, the latter being the easier option i.e. http://www.ebuyer.com/product/136214
Either way you will need to access the drive using windows on your new hard disk, the old disk will just another drive on the system.