Hi there! I'm hoping for some help here. My friend's old computer is no longer being used, so she asked me to pull the info off her old system HD. I took out the HD, put it in one of my USB external HD cases, and it doesn't show up in My Computer.

Yes, I did go to "Computer Management", click on "Disk Management", and locate the disk. However, when I right click on the partition, all the options in the pop-up menu are grayed out except for "Delete Partition". The drive is set as a Slave inside the external HD case, and the partition shows as "Healthy (Active)". It's a FAT32 partition (I know, I know, I didn't format it), and it is currently listed with no volume letter.

I did run a search, but all I was able to find in the forums (and Google, for that matter) were the steps I indicated I had already followed above.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

See if the drive has option to set it as CS (Cable Select) instead of slave, sometimes that works.

Does the enclosure work for other hard drives?

Can you physically add it to your computer without the enlcosure (slave and CS to see which one may work)

Did find this which also thinking same thoughts

The reason connecting directly to a ribbon cable is an advantage,
Is you can check in the BIOS to see if the ID string is visible
For the drive or not. If the drive refuses to ID itself (assuming
The master/slave jumpering isn't the problem), then you'd guess the
Drive controller is not able to complete initialization. Drives
Need to read some data from "sector -1", before they can offer
Service to the user.

seahwk83 - Thanks for the reply!

Yes, the hard drive does have a CS sumper setting, however that has yielded nothing new.

I believe that I can add it directly to the ribbon in my computer. I will give that a try and report back.

Thanks again.

So, adding it directly to the ribbon with the jumper set for CS or Slave doesn't help at all. Any other thoughts?

OK, you did try also as slave on the cable?

Also make sure that the drive is connected to the middle connector on the ribbon, not one on end

While attached to the ribbon cable on middle connector if not already and set to either CS or Slave, check the BIOS to see if it can be seen in BIOS - try both settings

If seen in BIOS and still not seen in windows explorer, you can try to use easus to try and recover some info


Easeus might be able to help recover some data if the program can see the drive (but bios would also have to see it)

There is a free edition
Free Data Recovery Software to free recover deleted files and recover formatted or corrupt hard drives - EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Free Edition. (http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/free-data-recovery-software.htm)

If does not help, depending on how important data may be, there are software you can purchase but no guarantee

Then can always format the drive and have the extra space

Why not just put the drive back into the old computer and bing it to your place where you have time to let it run and just copy it from there?