Hi All,
Need to slave a sata drive to retrieve OLD data...'the drive is faulty', read up that you can just connect an ide cable to the cdrom drive and boot up the system from the ide disk...my problem is i can't see any power lead cable to connect up the ide disk...anyone have a solution ? ....
Thanks.
TF.

A CDROM has a molex connector for power and an IDE connector for data.

To boot off a CD, you need a bootable CD and the boot sequence needs to include CDROM in BIOS.

What are you trying to do?

What i wanted to do was boot off the ide disk and hopefully have the sata disk available to copy off the contents of the sata disk onto the ide disk

So, you have a SATA hard drive that you would like to copy to an IDE hard drive?

yeah...the sata drive is faulty...the system is an optiplex system which doesn't have additional connectors to maybe put one sata disk into another...i read elsewhere on the net that this solution was achieved with an identical system but i can't workout how they powered up the ide disk...

If the SATA HDD is faulty, how to you expect to get the data off of it?

"you can just connect an ide cable to the cdrom drive and boot up the system from the ide disk"

The CD-ROM drive is already connected to an IDE cable....what IDE disk are you talking about? Is there a working SATA HDD in the system now?

It's not real clear to me what is wrong with your SATA hard drive.

If your SATA hard drive is not working, you might try to put it in another computer and see if it will work in that. If so, you might be able to retrieve data from it.

If the SATA drive is "faulty", putting it in the freezer as a last ditch solution might be worth while. Or, you could send it to a data recovery service.

I would suggest you boot your system off a Linux LiveCD first to see if you can actually access your SATA hard drive. Ubuntu, Knoppix, PCLOS are just some live cds available. They are free to download and use.

Either just download an ISO from any of the Linux sites like http://distrowatch.com/ or just buy a copy from any vendor listed on any linux site. They cost next to nothing ( usually just the cost of the blank disc plus shipping). You could even pick one up from the cover of a Linux magazine.

Once you've Burnt/Bought your live CD just insert it in your CD drive and reboot your PC (make sure your bios is set to boot of CD before your hard drive).

No need to open your PC case or install anything. Everything runs off the CD and you get to access Windows partitions.

Response #7 will work if the SATA drive can't be accessed in Windows but is seen in the BIOS. If the drive isn't spinning up then the only option might be the freezer trick or professional recovery.
You cannot SLAVE a SATA drive. All SATA controllers are stand alone. That said, you can always copy files from one drive to another if the drives are accessable. If the SATA drive was setup to be the boot drive try changing the boot order in the BIOS to boot to another drive, if you have another drive that is bootable with an operating system installed on it.

Thanks for all the helpful comments...i found a Dell GX620 tower system with 2 sata drives...comes as default...i was able to connect up the system but wasn't able to access the data...i'll certainly give the live cd option a go noting the comments in reply 8...

Thanks again.
TF