External Disk Drive Not Recognized

[4wheels]

I have a couple of disk drives from an old Tivo system that
I would like to do diagnostics on. I am using an IDE-USB cable
to connect the drives externally to my PC. When I power the
disk drives, I can hear them start up. A blue light comes on the
data cable. But my PC doesn't seem to recognize either of them -
when I look under Disk Management, they are not there. I am
testing them separately with a single cable.

Aside from a bad cable and completely dysfunctional hard drives,
is there anything else that could be causing this?

 

[darkguset]

Did you try on different USB ports?

 

[4wheels]

Yes, I did try on different USB ports. I also forgot to mention
that I tried different boot sequences, i.e., booting the computer
with the hard drive powered up and vice versa.

 

[darkguset]

1) Have you got proper power for the drives?
2) Have you test the IDE/USB cable with another drive and see that it actually works?
3) Do you have another computer with an IDE interface in where you can test it directly and not through USB, to verify that the drives are actually working?

 

[Guest]

1. Power failure
2. Disk port failure, change another port or another PC.
3. Bad disk, try check disk with the command.
4. Bad MBR. try some tool to fix it. a free tool http://www.recoverdeletedfile.info