[rustyknight]

Last October I shut down my Compac Pressario 5000 and unplugged the system from the wall just before I left town for a week. When I got back I plugged it in and turned it on. It had a sluggish boot-up, but it made it all the way through. It was running a bit slow so I tried rebooting. This time it wouldn't finish the boot process. I tried a number of times but ultimately, it stopped before it reached the point that you can get into the bios. Figuring that the system was toast, I bought a new pc (HP) and figured I could just pull the harddrives and hook them up to the new pc via USB to access the files. No such luck. My HP "sees" the drive (there's two of them - Western Digitals) but won't pull it up in My Computer. I tried the Computer Management program and it's there that the drive shows, but I cannot assign it a drive letter. The program tells me the drive is healthy and even sees how much space is used, but when I right-click on the drive, the only options I'm given is delete and help. I've downloaded diagnostic software from Western Digital's site and ran it on both drives. Everything says there's no problems with the drives but I still can't access them. I get the option to install them, but that will wipe the drive. I have a large number of files and programs on those drives that I need to recover. Being the dummy I am, I bought a DVD burner to back-up my files and never got around to doing it. Is there any way short of sending these drives to a professional recovery company that charges $350 and up?

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On the drives with the data, make sure the jumpers are set to "slave" position... then try again.

[makai]

On the drives with the data, make sure the jumpers are set to "slave" position... then try again.

[rustyknight]

I've had the jumpers in every position (except master) including having no jumper at all with the same results.