How to get data off former HD which had active partitions ?

[DBenz]

Hi,
How to get data off former HD which had active partitions ?

I have had a rebuild of my dual boot PC that had 2 internal ATA drives and a caddy with ATA, with three SATA 300 drives. Of the ATA's, one has my data on an extended partition (D drive), that same HD also had two active partitions (C) win2K and (F) winXP for my dual boot. Default boot was F. I had to use arrow key to selct the win2K drive and hit enter during bootup.

I wish to get my data off my old D drive onto my new D drive, that drive now is on a separate SATA HD to the OS's. I propose to put the old ATA in a caddy and bootup then use simple drag drop to transfer from old D drive to new D drive (obviously old D wont be seen as D, or would that in itself screw things up if it was ?).
My main concern is...Would the fact that there were two active partitions on that ATA cause a problem during boot ?

The caddy is still plumbed onto a raid card, the same raid card that the internal bootable HD was also onto.

Any advice appreciated
DBenz

 

[Fred]

Well, I suppose the obvious answer would be Norton Ghost :-D But I'm not sure if that's something you have available to you.

But I have to admit that I'm a little unsure as to whether your computer was set up in a RAID. If so, the setup of your raid would affect the difficulty of the recovery. Assuming all of the data you need to access is on a single hdd, there are a few of options i can think of off-hand:

• To get a Hdd bay from a local computer shop, hook up the hdd and connect it through usb. It will show up as an external hdd and you just drop the files in your current my Documents or whatever. If you have permission problems, you'd need to reboot to safe mode to adjust them.
  
• Like I said, you can also try Norton Ghost, but not a lot of people just have the cd lying around. Or at least, I dont. And if you do have a raid setup, Ghost should still be able to work for you.
  
• And lastly, if its ATA or SATA you can, of course, just hook it up to your current setup as a SLAVE and it will not affect the other active partitions.

Well, i hope i was able to help