Hdd not recognized

milostuvic

Posts: 23   +4
I just bought a 3.5" ata external hard drive enclosure for an old hdd but I is not recognized by the pc/laptop. I am using windows 7 on both of them. I already checked under disc management in settings for the drive letter but it doesn't show up at all. I also tried all different jumper settings possible on the hdd but had no luck. I tried it under windows vista as well with same results. By the way the hdd spins up just fine and there is a green led showing its jut fine but window doesn't recognize it at all. I even changed the usb cable with a different one but that also didn't help. Any idea how I can get it to work? Thanx in advance.
 
Do you have any other computers you can test this on? if not your own computer maybe a friends? if it doesn't work on ANY other motherboard I would point the finger at the hard drive. other than the hard drive being bad itself, the only other thing I could think of is changing your SATA settings in your bios from ahci to ide or vice versa. the settings may also be labeled as peripherals or something similar. since you said this is an ata hard drive and not a sata you may need to change from ahci to ide. just guessing though :p
 
I tried it on 3 different pc's (2 laptops and one desktop one laptop running window vista and the other 2 win 7) and non would work. I even tried another old ata hdd (because I have two one 400gb and one 160 gb) still no luck. I will try the in the Bios setting tonight and see if that works. I know that the hdd's worked before since I used it in an old pc that recently died and now I want to recover the data. Thanks again
 
Hi there,

There might be a problem with the enclosure you are using. Try connecting the drives internally and see if they will be detected then. Good luck.
 
I checked in the bios and there is a list of ide devices and I see only two devices and they are listed as master and that is my laptop's internal hdd and my DVD drive. (two more slave slots and one master slot say there is nothing detected) Even though my hdd enclosure is connected its not show on the list in bios. But I do here the windows sound when I disconnect the usb of the enclosure. As a last resort I will try to put the hdd's back in my old pc and copy the data from it to some other storage medium.
 
Hmmmm. have you tried going to the manufacturers website that made you computer you're trying to get it to work with? maybe an available bios update could fix it. in theory if one pc detects it the other should to. speaking from a bios standpoint that is.
 
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