today’s fastest drives are capable of saturating
the ATA/100 bus. Having said that, SATA drives
are easier to configure, because they have no
jumpers and their cables are much smaller
and easier to deal with.
As for transferring your data, you have
two choices: You can install the new drive
and then reinstall Windows and all your apps,
games, and so forth. Then connect the old
drive and copy over all the data files you
need. The easier solution is to purchase a
drive-imaging program, such as Ghost, and
clone the drive. The utility will ask you which
drive is the master and which is the target,
reboot the system, and then perform a bit-by-
bit transfer to the new drive.
BURIED TREASURE
I have a Dell 670 workstation with dual 3.2GHz
Xeons and dual 350GB hard drives in RAID 1.
My OS is messed up—it gets to the Windows XP
screen with the blue scroll bar, but then just sits
there and scrolls. I need the pictures, Excel, and
Word files on those hard drives, but the PC won’t
boot in Safe Mode or in any other configuration.
Am I stuck paying big bucks for professional data
recovery, or can I set those drives up as slaves on a
different system so I can grab the files off them?
—Donald Tucker
There’s no reason to pay for expensive data
recovery unless your hard drives crash. A
dead Windows install is usually pretty easy
to recover. You have two options: A utility
disc, such as BartPE (www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/)
will let you access a NTFS hard drive via a
bootable CD-ROM; alternatively, you can rein-
stall Windows to a different folder on your C:
drive (c:\winxp\, for example, instead of the
default c:\windows).
Reinstalling Windows in another directory
is not a long-term solution, but it should let
you access the drives long enough to back
up your precious data. But because you have
a Dell, it likely came with a restore-image
CD instead of an actual Windows-install CD.
If you use the restore-image CD to reinstall
Windows, it will overwrite everything on the
drive. And that brings us back to the BartPE
option: If you have another computer on
which you can build the BartPE disc, that’s
a vastly superior option. BartPE will bypass
the copy of Windows that’s installed on your
computer and let you transfer your files to
an external hard drive, USB key, network
share, or even a DVD.A drive-imag-
ing program,
such as Ghost
provides an
easy method
of transferring
your data from
one hard drive
to another.I
n your September issue,
Robert Burnham talked about
the death rattle on his Sony
DRU-710A DVD writer. I have the
same drive and experienced the
same problem while using Nero.
I was about to toss the drive in
the trash when I had a revela-
tion: The problem wasn’t the
drive, it was Windows! When I
examined the IDE channel prop-
erties using Windows’ Device
Manager, I discovered that the
device transfer mode had some-
how been changed from DMA
to PIO Only. Once I changed
this setting back to DMA 66, the
rattle disappeared and the drive
resumed reading all types of
optical media.—Pastor Dave AmbrosoSECOND OPINION