HD backup question

[Tuomas]

Hi

I realised my HD is living its last days, or that's what it sounds like. Anyway, I'm at my brother's computer trying to backup my important files (AGS, articles, music, etc). So I connected both his and mine to the same IDE, mine to device 1, his to device 0. Also, I changed the jumper from mine from MA to SL, as to make it a slave one, and my bro's the ruling one. There's another jumper which I didn't touch because the other HD didn't have that, basically it says C and S, it's set to S as far as I ca tell, it's a horizontal jumper, not vertical as the master-slave jumper, if you know what I mean.

So here's what's happening. I turned on the computer, it works just fine, XP notice a new device, recognised it as a hard disk and installed it. It was originally divided into 2 partitions, C: and D, whichhere are of course now F: and G: . However, the computer doesn't seem to recognise the other drive at all. The other, which has windows files, program files, documents and settings and such it reads like a book, but the other, the D: well it says this drive isn't formatted and asks if I want to do that. Well, I know it's got 30Gb of files in it that I'd like to backup before I format it, but the computer doesn't seem to be able to read it. So I was wondering if anyone would have any idea why this is? took me years to collect all that stuff, and I wouldn't want to go about it again, at least not in such a big scale. So... any suggestions?

[Radiant]

What file system are the various hard drives using?

It's possible that your old hard drive uses FAT32, and while Windows XP can read that, it defaults to NTFS, and may not have its FAT module installed.

[Tuomas]

I actually got it kind of working. I used my own HD as the master and my brother's as slave, but I went to bios and booted the computer through the slave HD. It was really slow, but it did the trick. Felt kinda awful to format it and lose 20 Gbs of music, but hey, I'll get the the way I got them the first place and I got the most important parts saved.

Oh, and radiant, they were the same, so that wasn't the problem, I should believe.