Modern PC's and old ATA drives?

At 02:54 PM 8/12/2007, Zane H. Healy wrote: There's lots of possibilities, of course. The drive could be dead. I've used at least three IDE to USB/Firewire adapters and it seems each acts a little differently when it comes to older drives and older partitions, so don't expect all levels of reporting to come up fine. It does sound like you're having more luck when it's directly on the motherboard. Be sure the jumper on the drive is set to "master" when on an adapter. Don't declare it dead until you've cold-booted with everything powered-up; sometimes I've found they don't quite wake-up the way you'd hope. Next, there's the issue of what's really on the drive. If you think it's readable, examine what's there in terms of partitions. The partition types may tell you more. It might have DoubleSpace or any of that era's disk-expanders. It might have a backup safety utility like GoBack in place. Either are odd enough that any contemporary Mac or PC won't see a simple FAT or FAT32 partition, so they'll give up without any useful error message. There are a number of useful bootable CDs out there with collections of tools for examining and imaging drives. The rule that "Sometimes you only get one chance to read a drive" is always in my mind. Image it ASAP. 1996 is "really old"? :-) - John