I had a slave drive with important family data (photos, etc.) crash and burn. I'm sure I'd made a disk image on the master drive. I believe it was a Far Stone program that generated the disk image The master still has data, I can see it all when I hook it up as a slave, though I see no disk image. This happened a few years back. I'd given up on it, though it's occurred to me, maybe the disk image is there, I just can only see it via the FarStone program that created it. If I could get that hard drive to operate as a master again with all the installed programs there were there at the time of the crash, I might be able to recover the data.

The motherboard that was also fried in this episode seems to be so obsolete no replacement boards can be found anywhere. I thought maybe if I found exactly the same board it would all boot up. If that truly is unavailable, is there another way to install a similar motherboard that will allow the drive to be fired up as the master and read the existing OS and all the installed programs?

Try your drive on any other computer, it might work.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

You mean PC motherboard or drive PCB ?

Do you have the "image" created by the FarStone program or what ? your post is very unclear on many levels it's all over the place. Try again and be more precise on what you have and what you don't have. What OS does the failed hard drive have on it? What is the make model of the failed motherboard and hard drive. This is a tech forum so you have to provide tech details general information posts like this don't help your situation.

@networks - All agreed, a very unclear & vague set of info from the OP, unfortunately, hence why I didn't bother replying earlier.

I think he/she may be dealing with PATA drives (hence the mentions of slave & master) and is now finding motherboards with only SATA ports, which is why they think they need some kind of special motherboard to attach those disks (e.g. they don't know about SATA/PATA adapters).

Of course there may be challenges if they tried booting their disk(s) using a different motherboard or SATA/PATA adapter, due to the usual Windows problems with hard-coded boot info in the registry, but that's a different issue.

But anyway, as you said, a much clearer description is needed, and when that is provided, perhaps some people will assist him/her.

Why not install the "FarStone" software on another drive and then use it to access your backup drive?

http://www.farstone.com/software/pc-recovery.php
http://3d2f.com/download/62-560-drivecl ... load.shtml

Do you still have the original "crash and burn" drive? It may be repairable, especially if it's just a board failure.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.