External Hard Drive Enclosure Problem

[Ungeek]

Hi!

I just bought an external 3.5" case for my internal 1 TB seagate hard drive. I initially had my internal hard drive attached onto the motherboard and formated it. I was able to transfer data onto it and then totally forgot about it for awhile. After awhile My computer didn't seem to be able to detect that hard drive, it gave me the blue screen. ( maybe because there isn't enough power to support the harddrive? .~~~i dont know?This is another issue i don't want to go into. ) But yes i was able to transfer files during the time it was working.


But anyways, I just recently bought an extern enclosure for it. So i follow the instructions and have so far installed the internal harddrive into the enclosure ((SATA to USB 2.0)). I turn the power on...it says installing driver and once it succesfully installs it i don't see the harddrive displayed in My Computer. I'm not sure what to do from here. I went into disk managment and it says Disk 1, Dynamic, Offline. I have no clue what that means.

Any help?

Thanks!

 

[Ubrales]

Welcome to Tom's Hardware Forums!

You said it was working as an internal drive. Do you have data on this drive? If not, just connect it as an external drive, go to Control Panel ---> Administrative Tools ---> Computer Management ---> Disk drives. Select the external drive and NTFS format it. Disconnect the external drive from the computer. Restart computer. Connect the external drive. It will be ready for use.

 

[Paperdoc]

If I read you right, the HDD worked OK at first, but later (after some period of non-use) you discovered that it is NOT working. Your system could not detect it. So then you mounted it in an external case, installed the required driver, and found - guess what! - it still does not work. No surprise there.

It appears you have a HDD that does not work. There are various steps to diagnosing that. Usually it is easier to test a malfunctioning HDD when it is mounted as in internal drive. So if diagnosis and attempts to fix it are your thing, put it back inside until you can fix its problems.

 

[Ungeek]

Ubrales I have data on it. So don't want to format it yet.
Paperdoc: My HDD is working fine. I connected it to my old PC running windows xp (where i originally installed it as an internal hard drive)...i was able to go into disk management and click reactivate it and it came back online...
but the issue arises when i connected it as an external hdd to my laptop running Windows 7...it says it was dynamic

so what i did was follow the instruction on this website (http://windows7forums.com/windows-7-support/3906-dynamic-disk-invalid.html)
I run the HxD program ( a hex editor), changed the value in column 1C2 from 42 to 07 which allows it to be converted from dynamic to basic. It worked however, I initially had 2 partitions on the HDD. So when i did this only one partition showed up... =( the other was invisible.

Does anybody know how to recover this?

 

[Paperdoc]

So, it appears your HDD is OK, but some info in the Partition Table got corrupted at some point. Or, maybe not.

You say when connected to your old machine running Win XP, it worked OK this time. BUT did it show properly BOTH of those two Partitions you expected to see? Were they both Basic Primary Partitions?

Then you moved it to the external enclosure and connected that to a laptop running Win 7, and it could not find anything until you ran a Hex editor to change some info. I don't know the structure of the HDD's Partition Table, but I have to assume that is what you altered to get it to "see" the first Partition as a Basic type. So that brings up two possibilities in my mind.
1. Does the change you made already alter the entire HDD to Basic - I expect yes. So, just MAYBE the second Partition is there but not quite recognized by Win 7. If you look in Disk Management at the LOWER RIGHT pane for this HDD, what does it show? One Partition recognized with a letter name etc, I would guess, because you can use that. But then what? Is there a second Partition, or is it just Unallocated Space? If it's a Partition, does it have a letter name? If not, you can RIGHT-click on at and give it a letter name, then back out and reboot. See if the second Partition shows up properly now.

2. Less likely, I think: the change you made applies only on one Partition (the first one) on the HDD, and you need to find a similar set of data in the Partition Table for the second Partition, and make a similar change of type code. Not for the faint of heart if you really dot no understand Partition Tables. Note carefully any change, so you can go back and un-do it manually if it does not work.