USB Hard Drive

[amckinley]

Hello All,

 

I have a Western Digital Hard Drive that I pulled out of a laptop because there was no bootable device found. Not too worried about that part of it. The owner of the now dead laptop would like to try and get the photos off of the HD. Just so happens that I have this Amazon.com: Vantec CB-ISATAU2 SATA/IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter Supports 2.5-Inch, 3.5-Inch, 5.25-Inch Hard Disk Drives (Black): Electronics . Which works like a champ, and has been used before.

 

My problem now is that I am trying to use it now, and look at the hard drive, but the computer I'm plugging it into is not recognizing that it is plugged in. It see's the adapter, and when you go into BIOS it recognizes there is a usb mass storage device, but it is not popping up in my computer... any ideas?

 

Thanks

[Dos_Box]

Moving to Hardware forum.

[MordyT]

Try spinrite. Make sure the jumper pin is set correctly if there is one. Is the disk initialized in diskmgmt.mc?

[amckinley]

How do I initialize without formatting?

[MordyT]

Right click, click initialize. If it asks to format, then something else is wrong.

[difinity]

You could also try booting the laptop from a Linux CD and seeing if the hard drive will mount.

I've recovered from a few that Windows couldn't access but Linux could.

[mac_shinobi]

Try and use test disk ?

 

TestDisk - Partition Recovery and File Undelete

[Davit2005]

Have you checked in Disk Management to see if it is there but not getting a drive letter??

[amckinley]

UPDATE:

 

It is not showing up under disk management in the area where you can assign letters to the drives. However, underneath there where it shows "Disk 0, Disk 1, CD-Rom 0 etc." it shows "Disk 1, unknown, not initialized." So I right click on it and try to initialize it. And then it gives me the error 'Virtual Disk Manager: Data error (cyclic redundancy check).'

 

I have not tried it in Linux yet, however that is a good idea. I will have to get my hands on a copy of it.

[SpuffMonkey]

Is it a SATA or IDE HD? If IDE - you'll need to reboot your PC for it to be seen

[amckinley]

It's SATA. I have rebooted numerous times to no avail

[SpuffMonkey]

Dodgy USB drivers on the host PC??

[mac_shinobi]

Disconnect an optical drive or use a free sata data and power cables to connect the hdd in the pc itself

[MordyT]

So I has the same issue but with ide and it was the jumper cable.