Seeking help reading an old WD Caviar 2540 drive

Wubert

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Mar 15, 2014
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I have a Caviar 2540 hard drive from my old desktop. I'm using a SimpleDrive 90000-40479-002 to connect it to my laptop and read what is on there. My laptop sees the device as a USB2.0 Storage Device, and I see a note that the "WDC AC25 40F USB Device" device driver software installed successfully, but that's it. I don't see the drive itself in Explorer. The Computer path only shows my C: drive.

In Disk Management, I see that Disk 1 categorized as "unknown 516 MB not initialized." Next to it is "516 MB Unallocated." When I right click, my options are only Properties or Help. I did try updating the driver, but that didn't help.

Suggestions?

My sincere thanks in advance!

Rob
 

E-50

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Jan 14, 2013
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could be outdated FS like Fat16 or something. easiest way to deal with this would be to download some data recovery software. I am not promoting any tools on here like you see in many threads. I've used a lot of stuff out there, and hands down R-studio and UFS explorer are the best tools you can download. Both offer demo versions that will let you take advantage of the tool and explore lost/corrupt partitions. Give one of them a try
 

cklaubur

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Sounds like you are having the same problem I am currently having with a 500 GB Seagate hard drive on my desktop computer. Judging from what is showing up in Disk Management, the hard drive's partition table has been corrupted, causing the drive to show up blank. With the correct software, it is possible to recover information from the drive, as long as you haven't tried to write anything to it.

I'm currently using a program called Photorec to try to recover data from my 500 GB drive, since I didn't have a recent backup, and had no warning it was failing. It hasn't found anything so far, but it has only been running for an hour.

Casey