I'm trying to retrieve some files from one of my parents old computers. It would freeze when every time you tried to start it, so I figured if I bought adapter I could pull the data directly from the hard drive to a working computer. I got a hold of IED-USB adapter, but when I start the power to the hard drive my laptop, which runs vista, does not recognize a drive. What could my problem be? I should also add that the device works fine when I use it with my old sata drives. Any help would be great.
Maybe something in the computer is loose. Open it up and make sure everything is secure and not loose.
It could mean your old hard drive is dying or something's wrong with it. If you have very important data that you need to recover. I would say search for a data recovery software/program and scan it. Does your laptop recognize or see the drive under Device Management under Computer Management?
When I expand the "disk drives" tab in the Device Manager I see two drives, my laptop's hard drive and "USB device" which is the three-in-one adapter that I'm trying to use. It works with sata drives, so I'm guessing that you are probably right about the old drive being damaged(though it does spin when connected to the power).
Click start, type "Computer Management" in the start search bar. In Computer Management - Click Disk Managment What do you see?
Since you are in the Disk Management. Rightclick on the external drive and see if there is such an option to enable it. Sometime it could be vista or your external device might not detect the drive on plug and play.
Are you saying when rightclicking on the harddrive in Disk Management, you don't have the option to "Initialize Disk"?
I don't really know what to say since it hard to trouble shoot over the internet. I have the feeling that your harddrive might be corrupted. How big is the hard drive? Another thing you can try is see if anyone is running XP and try to connect the USB device to a XP machine. If it's giving you the same error, it means the drive is corrupted. But the good thing is that if you are given an option to format it, do a quick format on the disk. After the format you can install one of the data recovery software and scan it and recover your important data.
