Harddrive removed from laptop and not recognized by new computer

kjbarclay

Distinguished
Jun 27, 2011
2
0
18,510
Hello,
I had an acer aspire 5532 with a toshiba hard drive in it. The computer refused to boot up. After several attempts to repair it, my husband bought a new computer. I have removed the hard drive (not making any weird noises so doesn't appear to be a physical failure) and put into a rocketfish hard drive enclosure to perhaps gain access to retrieve my files. However, in connecting it to my new computer, it just comes up as a new external usb device. In looking at device manager, it lists the device, but shows nothing on it, and doesn't give any access to it. Can anyone perhaps give another method to get the info off of this hard drive without costing an arm and a leg? BTW, I had a western digital hard drive installed in the enclosure, connected it, and it came up fine on the new computer, so I don't think it is the enclosure at all.
 

John_VanKirk

Distinguished
Hi there,

You're half way there in interrogating this outcast HDD! May be something as simple as it was assigned drive C: on the other computer and now there are two drives with the same DriveLetter. Lot's of other possibilities also.

Next step, go to Disk Management in the lower graphical section and list what it says about the Internal HDD, and the Removable HDD. The first row should be your system drive. The Drive Status should be similar to Disk 0, Basic, size, Online and the Volume Status should read something like VolumeName, DriveLetter, size, NTFS files system, Status Healthy (Primary Partition).

The next row, the Removable HDD, should be similar Disk 1, Basic or Dynamic, size, ect. Look to see if it is Online or Offline. Under the Volume Status, give us all the details, VolumeName, DriveLetter, size, FileSystem, Status. If one of these is missing, tell us.

Also list if one or both are listed as 'system, or boot' volumes.

That will give the group info about the HDD, and what has to be done to get it to act like any respectable HDD in modern society.