Quote Originally Posted by nimsey
I bought another (internal) hard drive and was trying to install it. It showed up fine in Windows Device Manager but would not show up in My Computer (with a drive letter). I tried putting the jumper on it to make sure that it was reading as a slave drive but that didnt make a difference.....
Lots of issues here:

First of all, did you try booting into Knoppix and see if you could view the files that Windows couldn't get to before adding the new hard drive?

Second, Knoppix usually is used to recover windows files when Windows can't boot at all. You're statement that "It showed up fine in Windows Device Manager but would not show up in My Computer" implies that you are (or at least were) able to boot windows fine after the files were "lost". In such a case Knoppix may not be of much help.

Third, it may well be (based on what you typed) that you didn't see the drive under My Computer (with a drive letter) because you had not partitioned the drive. One or more partitions must be created on the drive and then you must reboot before you see drive letters. You then need to format the partitions before you can save files to them. If you do partition and then format the drive (which can be done from Windows as well as from Linux), do not make NTFS partitions if you want to write to them from Knoppix, make some type of FAT partitions.

Forth, I'm not clear on what you have done with the jumpers. The new drive needs to be jumpered as a slave if it is on the same cable as the old drive (which should be jumpered as a master) and cable select is not in use. If the drive is on a different IDE connector as the other drive then it needs to be master if it is the only drive on that connector and slave if it is the second drive and the other drive is jumpered as master (and you are not using CS) . It does sound like your jumpering was right but when you changed the jumper it went wrong. Also be aware that many Western Digital Drives for some crazy reason need to be jumpered differently when they are the only drive on the cable than when they are the master drive of a pair, so often adding a drive when you alrady have a WD drive requires changing a jumper on the WD drive too.

Fifth, Linux often demands more properly configured hardware than Windows, so be sure the master/slave jumpers are correct for Knoppix even if Windows seems to wok.

Finally, while Knoppix may not help much in this case (only a guess based on the above), other live CD's like Helix might.