Can I repair a hard drive as a slave in another computer?

It has been awhile since I tried to reboot my Dell Inspiron 2650, but I think the drive is good but not loading Windows. The problem is to try to keep two expensive programs that I can't reinstall. I have no backups and would like to salvage the drive to continue using those programs. I've seen a few posts here indicating I might not be able to access the drive using a slave. Is this true? If so, why?

I have the IDE drive connected to another computer with a Dynex 2.0 USB docking station. It recognizes the drive but won't show me any files. Shows as 0.0 Gb. Is there anything I can do to salvage the drive? I don't care about recovering any data.

Hi Chic_Bowdrie,

Regarding your issue just plug your IDE HD in the system and configure your boot priority in BIOS and you should be able to access your information. Before doing that you should set the jumper on the hard drive to slave or auto select. To find the information on how to do this, it should be on the label of the IDE HD showing you which pin configuration is Master, Slave and Auto-select. To get into BIOS simply press delete button as soon as windows try to boot (keep pressing delete until a text based screen pops up.) After that scroll over to the boot section and configure whatever options you prefer. For example:

• 1st boot device=SATA HD

• 2nd boot device=IDE HD

• 3rd boot device=CD/DVD-ROM