I was told that I could connect my failed PC hard drive to a Mac to retrieve the data. I believe that it has a virus, it gives the black screen of death. The hard drive is removed, and a new one is installed. The machine works great, but when I put the old drive into the second slot and connect the wires, the computer doesn't recognize that it's there. So, I'm hoping someone here can educate me on the finer details of retrieving the data via a Mac.
mbaak 0 Newbie Poster
rch1231 169 Posting Shark
Hello,
It could be any number of reasons that the system does not see the drive when connected as a secondary.
If it is a PATA (Parallel ATA) drive with the ribbon style connector it is probably a jumper of the drive that is set wrong. On PATA (or IDE) drives jumpers are used to decide if it is the primary (master) drive on the cable or the secondary (Slave) or does it use the position on the cable (cable select) to decide if primary or slave. Also double check in the bios to see if the secondary drive is set to "NONE" or and set it to "AUTO" to tell the system to look for a drive. On Dell's you turn it ON instead of OFF.
If it is SATA again check the BIOS to see if the drive port is enabled.
As far as reading it with a MAC, probably. If the drive is not dead (and that is why the PC does not see it) then you could put it in a USB housing and connect it. Any MAC or Linux PC should see it and auto mount it for you to be able to access the data.
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