colingbradley

Just a thought, I did not change the jumpers on the old drive before putting it into the USB Caddy. Is that important? It was of course the master.

likewise the IDE USB connector, where is the power supplied from?

This will be first foray into the Linux world....gritting teeth....how and where do you connect the "easy IDE cable"? Does it have power for the old drive?

No clicking noises, seems to spin up normally with just a few sounds that may have been there before but I would not have heard. Now it is on the USB Caddy, I can hear it more clearly.

My HD crashed probably due to a bad sector or something. I could not boot up so installed a new HD and put the old one in a USB case and connected it to my portable to see if i could read any data. When I power up the old drive, it crashes and reboots my portable which then wants to check the C: drive. tried again and crashed the portable again. Looked at File Scavenger 3 but unable to use that as I cannot even get the old drive up and running. Portable is XP SP2. Old drive was XP SP2. Anyone got any ideas other that paying my hard earned to a disk recovery firm? TIA, Colin