I agree with this advice, it's really inexpensive to do and it's safe.RussellHltn wrote:What I've done is use a USB to IDE adapter and just connect the old drive as a external hard drive on the new machine. An external drive enclosure could do the same thing.
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I would strongly recommend you not try and do anything about reviving the drive in the old computer. If it's become this bad, it won't hold together long enough to do a recovery. It may even scramble the disk.
I have an empty external drive enclosure I keep around just to rescue hard drives. The particular enclosure I own can do both SATA and IDE. This is the one I've owned for over 2 years and still going strong (although, apparently it is a deactivated item on Newegg.com now; it's got all the right specs to be very flexible): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817423006
As for your idea to use the DandC89 credentials, I think you may have it confused. This is not a password, but a username, and I don't believe it's an available username at boot time either.