Hi,

I am new here and do not know much about computers. I had a toshiba laptop which turned off while I was watching a DVD and did not turn back on. A friend had a look at it and said that the DVD player caused the problem but my hard drive was fine. I bought a sony vaio as my toshiba was old and needed replacing. But I still need to recover all the files that were on the hard drive in the toshiba. The model of the hard drive is Fujitsu MHV2040AT.

I was going to take it to a data recovery company but was told that by using an Icy Box I could recover the data myself and make use of the spare hard drive; so I bought one. (model IB 220) I connected my hard drive to the Icy Box and then to my laptop. Messages came up idetifying the new hardware and stating that it is ready to use. So I clicked the Computer tab and saw that there was in fact no new drive. However, it did show in the "safely remove hardware" bit and also under drive management. Under drive management, it is termed as unallocated space. I know it is the external harddrive because the internal hard drive also comes up and is a different model. I have no idea where to go from here. I tried looking at theads in the forum and seem to have gathered that the hard drive needs formatting, but won't this erase all the data on the drive? I may be wrong as I have no idea about anything computer related. I tried using the Icy Box and old hard drive in a PC that runs on XP and the same problem occured there. I also restarted both the laptop and the PC and the old hard drive was still not usable. Any help would be appreciated as I urgently need the data from my old hard drive.

Thanks

p.s. the sony runs on vista, and my toshiba used microsoft works, don't know if that info is needed or not