2 HDD, 2 BOOT LOADERS, Probably something easy

[Drake2k]

I had two computers With Linux mint on them. Well, one computer died. I wanted to salvage data off of the hard drive (since it's fine). The problem is that when I put it in my working computer I think the computer is getting confused as to which boot loader to use. Both drives were configured as a primary (only) drive.
I don't get grub or the splash screen or nadda.

I tried using my BIOS' boot menu where it will actually let me choose a device manually to boot from to no avail. I just get a blank look.

Is there anything I can do on my main computer/drive/distro to tell the computer to ignore drive number until Until I have a chance to remove the data and reformat the drive?

[ed@Mint]

Don't you have a 'physical' jumper on your second hdd itself to make it slave ?
If not, the order you connect them on your mainboard might help the bios know which one is the primary drive.

That's all i can think at the moment...
Let us know...
ed

[Fred]

Drake2k,

You have several ways to go here.

1) Set the drive you are trying to salvage to slave instead of master. Put the master drive at the end of the ribbon cable and the slave drive on the connector that's part way down the cable. This assumes both your drives are IDE.

2) Swap the hard drive connectors on the two drives if they are both SATA drives.

3) If the main drive is SATA and the salvage drive is IDE, this is a harder nut to crack. Try setting the IDE drive to slave. This will usually work. Some BIOSs will always want to put the IDE drive in the primary position, regardless of the setting.

4) Saving the best for last. If it were me, I would disconnect the salvage drive so the system was back like it was.... working. Then download and burn Puppy Linux. The link below is the version I use. It is only 155 MB. Then plug your salvage drive back up. Boot from the live cd of Puppy you just burned and use that to transfer all the files you want to save. You can zero the drive, if you feel the need, and partition and format the salvage drive all from there.

http://tmxxine.com/Wikka/wikka.php?wakk ... xxineShard

Fred

[Drake2k]

Beautiful, I'll give option 4 a whirl. I could probably also use the linuxmint live cd to do that but I'm sure that smaller one would run faster.

To answer the questions above

I did move the jumpers to select salvage drive as slave and didn't change the jumpers on the Master as it was already jumpered as master, not cable select.
It is at the end of the ribbon and they're both IDE. (should have mentioned that before, my bad)


I'll let you know how the pully *nix does.