Can transplanting SATA drive from one PC to another damage it ( Partition/filesystem corruption)

noisecrime

noisecrime

noisecrime

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Hi,
Got myself into a bit of pickle and would appreciate any input.

Are there any issues/pitfalls with physically transferring a primary boot HDD from one PC to be a secondary HDD of another?

Can the act of installing the HDD into another PC cause damage, specially resulting in the HDD partitions not being recognized in Disk Management and the whole thing coming up as 'RAW'?

Please note i'm not trying to boot from the transplanted HDD and the PC booted as normal from its HDD.


The reason for asking is my mates 12 year old Vista PC finally died last week. He'd mentioned some issues with the monitor and once I got to look at it I instantly diagnosed it being a graphic card failure. It had all trademark signs, at least to me, after being on for about 5 minutes it exhibited pixel corruption that progressively got worse. Some odd pixels but thinking about it now more like memory corruption of Vista render elements, e.g. explorer, windows, popups etc. In fact I suspect the GPU completely failed as I was there as the monitor went black/turned off completely for no good reason. Although that could have been a sign of something worse, maybe a PSU failure?

Anyway while he could look for a replacement GPU ( second hand ) I suggest that he instead take my old Win 7 PC ( Titan PC from Overclockers - great little machine ) which was a few years younger than his and more powerful components. I figured this would be the easier solution especially for the future since not even browsers actively support Vista any more and so moving to a Win 7 machine would give a few more years of application support.

With this in mind I grabbed his two internal HDD's ( both 160GB SATA) and took them home to install into my old WIN 7 system. I didn't know which of the two drives were the old boot drive so I just picked one at random. My Win 7 machine had a spare power connector ( its one of those wires that have an end connector but then two others 'spliced' or daisy chained into the lead - don't know correct terminology ) and then I hooked up the SATA cable to a spare connector on the motherboard.

Booted the Win 7 machine and to my horror a dialog popped up saying to format the transplanted drive! I think this happened after Win 7 automatically installed drivers for the new HDD and auto-assigned a drive letter to it.

Did some digging online and discovered the transplanted HDD was coming up as 'RAW' file system under disk management. As far as I could tell looking at device manager the HDD was recognized and drivers installed and claimed to be working. I had been using the Win 7 machine for a day before trying to install the HDD and from what I can tell its in perfect working order. No hardware issues, no temperature issues, no power issues.


My Questions:

The main question I have is that I have a second drive of my mates ( presumably the non-boot data drive from his old machine ). I really want to try installing that into the Win 7 machine as that is probably the more important one with all of his data on it. However now i'm concerned that the act of installing it might corrupt it? Do you think its safe to install this other drive or should I not touch it?

I'm now wondering with the fact that both drives are the same make/model and 160GB if perhaps it was set up in a RAID configuration. Could that explain the issues I was seeing?


With regard to the corrupted HDD my questions are;

1. Have I just been really unlucky and normally you can simply plug & play with modern SATA HDD and OS?

2. Are there any issues normally with transplanting a HDD from one machine to another? Is there anything that the act of installing the drive that could have cause the file system to become corrupt?

3. Does the transplanted drive being a boot drive present any issues as long as i'm not trying to boot from it?

4. I assume if the HDD has a SATA connection and a typical power connector then can you simply just plug and play into a motherboard? No issues with different SATA connector types, which SATA connectors to use or Power consumption/watts/amps etc? I.e. anything on the physical or electrical side of things?

5. Are there any bios settings or set up either on my mates old machine or my new machine that might have caused this issue? I looked through my Win 7 bios and could't find anything useful in there that might help. It says SATA is set to IDE mode, the alternatives are ACHD or RAID.

6. Could my mates drives have been set up in RAID configuration? Is there any way to tell? If they are RAID how the heck do I get them working in my system considering I don't want to boot from them as its a different machine?

7. Any advice on what to do next with this HDD?

Thanks for any help you can give.



General Hardware Information:

Testdisk.exe report for damaged drive - Seagate ST3160812S

Current partition structure:
1 P Dell Utility 0 1 1 5 254 63 96327
Invalid NTFS or EXFAT boot
2 * HPFS - NTFS 6 30 25 19128 110 54 307200000
2 * HPFS - NTFS 6 30 25 19128 110 54 307200000
Invalid NTFS or EXFAT boot
3 P HPFS - NTFS 19128 110 55 38903 181 62 317689856
3 P HPFS - NTFS 19128 110 55 38903 181 62 317689856

Disk /dev/sdb - 160 GB / 149 GiB - CHS 19452 255 63
Check the harddisk size: HD jumpers settings, BIOS detection...
The harddisk (160 GB / 149 GiB) seems too small! (< 241 GB / 224 GiB)


The Windows 7 PC - Titan from Overclockers.co.uk

Intel Core i7-920
ASUS P6T DELUXE
Intel AMT Support: Not Supported
SATA RAID 0/1/5/10: Supported
It has 6 SATA points on the motherboard - 3 of them are difficult to access, but two of those are already used for the original win 7 HDD and a CD-ROM. Another two are easy to access facing vertically upwards on the MB and its one of these that I used - I assume all SATA connections are standard and the same?

Existing HDD - Serial ATA 3Gb/s - Seagate ST3500418AS
 
noisecrime said:
6. Could my mates drives have been set up in RAID configuration? Is there any way to tell? If they are RAID how the heck do I get them working in my system considering I don't want to boot from them as its a different machine?
Click to expand...
I think that is a real possibility from what you have described. Especially if the drives are identical models. Will your mate's PC boot into BIOS OK? If so you could check the configuration there.

If they are a RAID set, then getting this to work on another system will depend on the type of RAID and the controller used. If they were a mirror set (RAID 1) then it is normally possible to access a single disk on another machine. However, if they are a stripe set (RAID 0) then you need both disks and a compatible RAID controller in order to import the RAID.

Safest option would be to get them back in the original PC with a temp graphics card so that you can copy the data off to another drive.
 
Thanks for the replies.

I guess one thing I'd really like to know is if there is any way I could be damaging the second drive if I try that in my Win 7 machine? By adding that disk i'll be able to tell if they might be RAID or not since presumably it would come up the same as the first drive did or it would simply come up as normal. If it is RAID then i'm not sure what I can do.

The whole problem here is my mate simply has no funds to spend, thats why he's kept his PC for 12 years in the first place. Even though a second hand GPU would only cost about £25 ( needs a GTX 7900 GS I think ), you still have the danger of getting a broken one, and if going new I'm not sure his PSU would support any of the current cheapest GPU's on the market.

So the first step then is there any danger trying to install his second disk into my system? As far as I can tell its a SATA drive and my win 7 has spare SATA slots and power connections. I assumed that these were simply plug and play but having put the first disk in and that apparently getting corrupted has me worried that I might cause damage to it.

Thanks
 
There should be no harm in connecting up a drive so long as you don't initialise or format it. As you said, if it is indeed the other half of a RAID set it will also just appear as a RAW drive.

In home PCs, RAID is a chipset feature enabled in BIOS, combined with drivers installed in the O/S. These will no longer match if the transplanted drives are indeed RAID. In which case you are going to have a hard time getting the RAID to be recognised in anything other than the original PC, or one very similar to it.

The other possibility is that the drive(s) are encrypted with Bitlocker or similar. In which case you would need the decryption key (unlikely you will have this), otherwise it needs to go back into the original PC.

Can you not temporarily use the GPU/PSU from the Titan in the original PC so that you can boot it up and copy the data off the drives?
 
If they are indeed in a RAID0 set, it may be possible to connect them both to the new PC, ensuring they are connected to Intel SATA ports (Rather than any other extra sata ports), ensure RAID is turned on in the bios, and then enter the Intel RAID bios, which may detect them and allow you to import the array.
 
Armageus said:
If they are indeed in a RAID0 set, it may be possible to connect them both to the new PC, ensuring they are connected to Intel SATA ports (Rather than any other extra sata ports), ensure RAID is turned on in the bios, and then enter the Intel RAID bios, which may detect them and allow you to import the array.
Click to expand...
I'm doubtful Vista will boot a RAID on newer hardware when it will be loading a driver for a different/older storage controller.
 
Just a quick update.

I tried installing the second disk and not too unsurprisingly it also failed to be recognized. However this time it doesn't get assigned a drive letter and simply comes up as 'Unknown' in Disk Management. It did from what I can remember appear to be the same size as the other disk - i.e. only 149GB instead of 160GB. This all suggests to me that there is a good possibility that this was set up as a RAID drive. I'm not sure why the first disk came up, perhaps due to the custom dell restore partition?

Anyway while I could have ran testDisk.exe on it ( maybe ) or investigate if it would work if I enabled RAID on the bios, its just not worth my time or the risk to those disks or the current boot disk for win 7. I think if my mate wants to get the data of, then he'll have to stump up and find a second hand replacement gpu. I can't use my gpu as the vista PC only has 375Watt PSU and only a single 6 pin power connector. The PC is so old its not worth buying a new GPU, assuming you could get one that fits the power requirements and connectors.

I can't think of anything else to do in the situation. So he might just have to take the loss and hope his backups have all his important data.


Thanks for everyones input.
 
Couldn't you just buy a cheap second hand graphic card from an auction site, get the data off drives, then sell the graphic card when you're done.
 
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