I've just found and old computer I had retired when I bought this one. I removed the hard drive from the old one as it was no longer working,,,windows wouldn't boot so I replaced computer. I've tried connecting it to my new one both as a USB drive as well as a slave drive on my current HD. The old drive is an ide western digital 80G. The current drive is a WD sata 160G. The old computer was running windows XP home edition before it crashed and the new one is using windows XP media edition. My problem is that no matter how I connect the drive I cannot access it. It shows up in device manager as well as in Disk manager. However in Disk manager it is not given a drive letter. When I try to change that it only gives me an option to delete, not to change path. I dont want to delete the drive since it has some pictures and music I would like to save. I have done this process with a hard drive from my wifes laptop with no problems so i kind of know what I am doing. Any advice would certainly be welcome.

Mike

I have tried changing the jumper on it as well to all 3 choices given. Seems to have no effect

Maybe this File Recovery App would be of use.
Recuva

yes the drive would still be visible, just not accesible, without formatting. there is another program u can try to use called chkdsk or check disk. It was a dos based app so im not sure where it would be now. perhaps a search on microsoft.com or even just google for chkdsk might help.

Thanks for the advice will try and see if this helps. Not sure I can get chkdisk to work though since the drive isnt recognised and therefore doesn't show up in the options as one of the choices to check. I'll give it a shot though.

Thanks again
Mike