Cant view Hard Drive in My Computer

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lifelink

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Sep 5, 2013
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Hopefully somebody can help me out here. I'll be pretty detailed so sorry if its so long!

The hard drive i'm having trouble with is a Western Digital IDE. Originally if i had it hooked up to my old XP PC, didn't matter if it was master or slave it wouldn't boot up, when unplugged everything was fine.

SO

In order to get to the data i purchased a IDE/SATA link with external power supply so i could view it on my new Windows 7 PC. The hard drive is installed yet does not appear on 'My Computer'.

When i go into 'Device Manager' it shows up in 'Disc Drives' as 'WDC WD12 00BB USB Device'. in 'Properties' it shows up as working properly and the driver is up-to-date.

When i go into 'Disc Management' it asks me to 'Initialize Disc' yet comes with 'Incorrect Function' when i try.

I have tried the same process on a Windows 7 laptop and a Windows XP PC, the exact same thing.

Any ideas on a solution?
 
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Paperdoc

Polypheme
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Oct 19, 2006
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The messages you are getting on the new machine with the adapter and old drive are just confirmation that the computer can reach the adapter and it is working. However, that does NOT tell you that the old drive itself is working.

To start with, you tell us that, when connected to the IDE port of an older computer, the drive did not work - you could not access it. So why did you think it would work if you connected it to a different system? It appears to me that the drive is faulty. If it contains data you want to recover, do NOT Initialize it, or Format it, or Partition it. Do NOT do anything that will WRITE to the drive. You probably need to do some testing and diagnostics of a NON-destructive type to determine whether anything can be recovered from it. If it looks possible, you'll need some data recovery software and a second HDD. Almost all data recovery software will try to COPY all it can from the faulty unit to a second unit - it is never a good idea to write to a faulty drive in trying to "fix" it.

If disk diagnostics and data recovery utilities seem beyond your capabilities but you do NEED the old data, you'll have to pay some experts to do the job. Warning: they can be VERY expensive!
 
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