Computer Hard Drive Repair

by Christina
(Opelika, AL)

Inside an Internal Hard Drive

Inside an Internal Hard Drive

I bought a new computer but still had my old, secondary hard drive from my old computer that was no longer working.

The secondary drive (80 GB) was originally supposed to replace the older hard drive (40 GB) in the old computer. However, I decided to keep the 40 GB hard drive, and used the 80 GB hard drive as a secondary one instead.

I copied most of my files to the secondary drive before the old computer finally crashed due to lack of space. The issue was: I couldn't get the new computer to read the 80 GB drive so that I could get access to my music, photos and other data files.

To get the drive connected to the new computer, I used an adapter that plugged into the USB port in my new computer. But I kept getting an error message. I kept researching the error message and changing lots of settings in the BIOS, but nothing I tried worked.

Finally, I read something about changing a setting with the hard drives PINS. I did that and the computer immediately recognized the drive as an external drive!

I believe the issue was that I was trying to tell the computer that the old drive was the master (or Primary) and it wasn't buying it. Once I changed it to slave (or secondary), it worked fine.

I could copy everything from that secondary drive over to my current external hard drive. It was great to have my iTunes library back again, as well as my family photos and various other data files.

The lesson I learned from all this is to always have a backup for all your files and never wait till the last minute before replacing a computer or hard drive.

You can spend years building up your music and photograph collection, but it only takes a second to lose everything when you don't regularly back up your files.

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by: Steve

Thank you, Christina, for your story.

There are 3 take home lessons from Christina's story:-

1. Backup, Backup, Backup!

This is a saying in the IT industry, and it applies just as much to home computer users! It is all too easy to think "I'll back up tomorrow" or "What's the chances of it happening to me". It can and it does.

Back up your files to another hard risk, like Christina has, or to CD, DVD or USB stick. Then back up again to another device. It sounds overboard, but it's saved me from losing information on more than one occasion.

Backup regularly too. Microsoft Windows and Apple's OS X Operating Systems come with backup facilities. Make use of them!!


2. Installing Hard Disk Drives is not impossible

Modern computers are set to auto-detect new internal hard disk drives. If the secondary hard disk drive option is disabled in a computer's BIOS, this can easily be enabled.

Modern hard disk drives (HDD's) do not tend to come with jumpers (or PINS on which the jumper was placed). Intelligence is built into new HDD's, so they are automatically detected as either the primary or secondary drive.

This means it should be easier for you to do something like what Christina did.

I remember changing jumpers on HDD's. Originally, there was no way to identify which pins the little jumper should go on to make it a secondary drive. There were always several pin combinations too. Quite often it was trial and error until you got it right.


3. Persist with reading and learning about how to support your computer systems

Christina did, and she learned how to do computer support for herself. Follow her example.

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