Connecting a Second Drive to Access Main Drive
Read the Safety Procedures. Very Important!!!
If you are trying to access your data on your drive but cannot due to either a hard drive failure or corruption, this is one option to access the data. If your hard drive is failing, this procedure may or may not work. If you can't access your files because of corruption, this procedure should work unless the corruption totally damaged the files. One word of caution. If the corruption is caused by a virus, the old drive can infect the new drive. Be sure to install anti-virus and scan it.
- Disconnect your drive from the data cable and leave it disconnected. NOTE: Be sure to leave your old drive disconnected during the install of the new drive. This will make sure your data on your old drive has not been touched during the install.
- Connect the new drive as the primary drive
- Install windows
- Reconnect your old drive to the data cable as secondary drive.
- Reassign drive letters so your old drive is now drive D
Now you should be able to access the data on your old drive. If you still can't access the files, either the drive has failed or the corruption is bad enough to prevent access to the data. If you still can't access your data, you can contact a data recovery company to see if they can retrieve your data. They are very expensive and not 100% guaranteed. There is several data recovery companies such as Ontrack, Drivesavers and other companies.