I was talking to a guy today who has a generic barebones tower and XP service pack 2. He recently BOUGHT a new IDE 160 GB Western Digital hard drive. He was going to slave his old drive (also a 160 GB WD) and install XP on his new one. Sounds simple enough. However, when he brought it to me it wasn't booting properly. I opened it up and took out the jumper for the master drive and rebooted. Both drives showed up in the BIOS and were enabled.

When I checked both C: and E: in My Computer, they were IDENTICAL. They seemed to have the same info. That is, the information from his old drive was gone. His old drive, which had alot of data on it, was a mirror image of his new drive (which of course had an OS install).

My question is, did he somehow install XP on both drives?? If so, how is this possible?

I don't think that it is, but the drives were the exact same. Kinda perplexed me.

Any thoughts?bump If the used space of the drives is close i'd say this is exactly what he's done...and his old Data is probably gone.
Unless he want's to shell out big bucks for Data Recovery services...
You MAY however GET EXTREMELY lucky by taking Ownership of the old drive...i give it about one chance in thirty...

Clik
yea i knew how to take ownership of the drive, but didn't think it would matter b/c the drives were identical in disk space used so I knew the data was gone. There are no faded out folders or anything, just the standard My Documents, etc.

How does something like that happen?I've seen users do plenty of strange things to their machines and when questioned about it important details are usually left out so i wouldn't even begin to guess...
It probably didn't boot properly the first time and he ran the install again and chose the wrong drive.