Hi Guys and Girls,

I'm trying to access files from my old hard drive taken from my broken laptop and experiencing some confusing problems. I'm using a 2.5" usb external enclosure to house the hard drive.

The hard drive when plugged in triggers the "safely remove hardware" icon to appear on the tool bar however nothing appears in my computer. When looking in device management nothing is visable.

I tried restarting my computer with the drive plugged in and got a even more confusing result occured. My computer contains FOUR removable disk drives (H:,I:,J:,K:) but none of them can be explored. If I click them I am propted to insert a disk. In Disk management all four of these disks are present but there is no imformation of them (eg space left etc) and they're number disk 2-5. I can only select "change Drive letter and paths" when right clicking them.

I am stumped!

Any help would be greatly appreciated and would save my bacon!

Cheers

Joel

Well I can answer one question for you - those drive letters are often associated with memory card readers (do you have those little slots where you'd stick an SD card in?), especially if they have no label. Your external hard drive would likely have some kind of label and that's how you would recognize it. Does the enclosure have it's own power source or does it get it from the USB cable?
Try taking the enclosure to another computer to see if it is recognized there.