Any chance of recovering or throw in bin time?

[do_it_anyway]

About a week ago I got the dreaded blue screen of death while doing a virus scan on my laptop pc.
It seems that my lappy HDD had decided it had done enough in this lifetime and failed. There were about 6 bad sectors found when running a disk check. It refused to boot up windows, so i replaced the HDD and reloaded everything I could.

I then decided to get an IDE converter and run the disk as a slave in order to recover as much as possible. Unfortunately the IDE converter had a 40 pin connector with no blocked off pin 20(?), so it wouldn't fit my IDE cable.
And the lappy hdd gave no indication as to which pin was pin 1 etc.

So I have mounted the HDD in an external USB caddy and plugged it into another machine.
Windows detects it and installs it as a removable mass storage device. Unfortunately the size of this storage device is 0 bytes. Error checking and fixing won't work because there is nothing to check! And running a backup programme backs up 0 bytes (unsurprisingly)

I am about to chuck the lot in the bin and put it down to experience, but if anyone knows anything else I can try, please let me know.

 

[evongugg]

What works for me when external hard disks are not recognized in one computer is to plug it in another computer. For some reason the problems disappear.

 

[GSTe]

A bit strange.... my brother's external HDD did this once, just lost all his info for no reason... could be anything I suppose, windows deciding to delete the partition, power issues...? If windows recognises the HDD then the hardware must be okay, so I'd chuck it personally.

 

[do_it_anyway]

I tried it in two PC's - no luck.

In the end, rather than chuck it, I decided on a full format and its working again.

I can't figure out why it couldn't find any of my info, when it was probably a problem with bad sectors only. Strange.

Anyway, I have lost some of my info (had about 90% backed up), but gained an external 2.5" HDD, so its not all bad!!