# Hard Drive failure on old AST computer



## Gracey (Aug 20, 2002)

I have an old AST Advantage computer with a DOS 5 Operating System. I'm getting an error message saying "Error encountered initializing hard drive". I need to get some data files that were not backup recently. Is there a possible way to connect this dinosaur to my laptop with Windows 98 OS so I can get my data files off it? Is there any cheap software I can use on my laptop to connect to the AST and access the hard drive or maybe I can make the AST "hardware" and add it through Windows ADD HARDWARE? 

Thanks for any help!


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## Lurker1 (Jan 30, 2001)

Hi Gracey

Well I have never worked on an advantage computer and havent seen that message before. You may be able to find some help here.

http://support.tandy.com/support_computer/3280.htm

You need to see if the hard drive is an IDE type drive. If not I doubt that you will be able to hook it up to anything new to read the hard drive.

You might try reseating the cables to the hard drive and checking to see if the drive is spinning up. It may be that the drive has died of old age. You should be able to boot up with a floppy disk and run fdisk (option 4) to see if the partition table is OK.

If your system is one of the ones listed on the advantage page I gave above it looks like the drive is an IDE and can be hooked up as a slave on a different computer (not a laptop). Then if the drive is still good you can probably copy the data off it to the master drive. BOL


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