Technofyed

Ok, so I've got a few hard drives I pulled out of old computers, they've all got the same problem, they all say the same thing: "boot error, insert boot disk" or something along those lines. It wont even let me access the hard drives when I've got them set up as slave drives, it shows that its there, but when i double click to open it, or right click to go to properties, nothing happens.

I haven't done any of this recently, it's been a few months, so a few things might be a bit off, but I'm pretty sure that's all right up there, if there's any more information you need, please let me know and I'll give you everything you need.

Do you know if these drives had operating systems installed on them?

the first one I noticed the problem on did, I'm not sure to the rest of them.
The first one was the only HD in the computer at the time, worked fine, we moved the computer into another room and turned it on, then poof, that message appeared.

What I would do (& we do this as a paid service for customers, that have similar problems from viruses or power failures to the machine) is load the drive into a Linux system & use dd to get a binary, bit for bit, dump of the drives contents. This iso file that is an exact copy of the drive can then be mounted, have the data copied out, reformat the drive, & then dump all of the data back on.

If you wish to attempt this, I would strongly recommend that you read up on the command & even try a few non-important drives.

If you really want to get the data off of these drives, & don't wish to try it yourself, feel free to shoot me a pm.

Are you trying to get data off of the drives or are you just wanting to get them to work?

I think I'll just whip the drives and use them as slaves, after all, I only need one working computer. =P