External hard drive keeps getting detected and lost

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karan91121

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Oct 22, 2013
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10,510
I had a dead computer. I just wanted to take some important files out of its SATA hard drive. So I bought a usb to SATA cable and adapter on ebay. Getting all the connections rightly plugged, and the ext hard drive has its power on and everything working, my laptop detects the USB, when I open my computer, 4 new hard disk partitions appear as I, J, K and N, along with the partitions of my the drive in my laptop, i.e., A,C, L and M. But the new drive partitions' icons do not show up with its "storage and used space" bar and also when I try to open one of the new partitions the computer freezes for a moment and then a message pops up saying "I: refers to a location that is not available" adn that network and all crap message. Also the drive partitions' icons keep disappearing and reappearing each minute. Once I was lucky enough to quickly try to open one of the partitions, before they vanished, then for 2 seconds I could see the files that I had on that drive(Oh that feeling of seeing the dear files you saw an year ago)but the window automatically closed saying the the drive (I:) has been removed although the usb detector in bottom right taskbar correctly shows the usb as connected. HELP.specs- DELL 14z laptop, i5 2.5 GHz, 6GB DDR3 RAM etc.(Don't worry about the specs they are good enough). HELLLLPPPP!!!
 
Solution
dannylivesforher
First,make sure you have all the controller drivers installed. So,what you could try is look for those partitions in Disk Management. Right click My Computer---> Manage--->Go to Disk Management. See if the partitions of the Laptop Hard disk are detected...If they are shown as Unknown,then you'd need to Initialize them by right clicking and selecting initialize.But that's not probable to happen.If they're shown with a letter that's already assigned to the partitions of your HDD,then you may need to assign it with another letter manually.For that,right click on the partition in Disk Management and select Change Drive letter and select an available letter from the drop box. But remember,changing the drive letter may result in losing all...
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karan91121

Honorable
Oct 22, 2013
2
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10,510


thanks dannylivesforher, the usb cable is 2.0, I've got 2 usb 3.0 ports and one usb 2.0 port, this 2.0 showed a bit better results (drive partitions' icons stay on for a bit longer.....say 10 more seconds than usb 3.0, then I tried it on a windows 7 laptop of a neighbour and it works without a fault (mine is windows 8) what do you suggest.......
 
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dannylivesforher

dannylivesforher

Honorable
Sep 21, 2012
776
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11,160
First,make sure you have all the controller drivers installed. So,what you could try is look for those partitions in Disk Management. Right click My Computer---> Manage--->Go to Disk Management. See if the partitions of the Laptop Hard disk are detected...If they are shown as Unknown,then you'd need to Initialize them by right clicking and selecting initialize.But that's not probable to happen.If they're shown with a letter that's already assigned to the partitions of your HDD,then you may need to assign it with another letter manually.For that,right click on the partition in Disk Management and select Change Drive letter and select an available letter from the drop box. But remember,changing the drive letter may result in losing all the data.So make sure you backup the data,should you plan to try this fix.
 
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