Accessing old IDE hardrive

update:
further reading on the ME320x USB external enclosure shows some known incompatibility with Western Digital hard drives. Any ideas here?

It's a old IDE drive.... Have you played with the jumpers.... Master/Slave/CS

i keep a cheap external enclosure around for this kind of thing, i picked mine up at goodwill for i think 7 dollars.

This is the sign of hard drive failure.

The drive is likely dead. A data recovery service like Ontrack will probably be able to recover all or most of the files on it; you will need to decide if it's worth the price. I believe they (and similar services) charge a modest diagnostic fee, then tell you what they'll be able to recover and what it will cost. If you want to pay, they recover the drive and send you the files.

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Just picked up one....we shall see in 3 - 5 days

if it a software issue with a partion sometime drive software recovery tools can fix the issue where you can recover the data.
with an old drive you have to see if it the spindle or the controler card that may have failed. if the drive is spinning but not seeking then the controller pbc card may have failed. if the drive not spinning or it spins up and down or it maing a lound buzzing sound or clicking...then it hardware of the drive. sometime with old drives if you swap the pbc board from the failed drive to a new one from the same drive model. sometime you can get the old drive to work to get the data off. myself if the photos cant be lost i would not fool with the drive. the more you do the harded it will be for a drive lab to recover the photos. it may cost a few$$ to do it but she should be able to get most of them off the drive. if your grandma has photos now she cant lose help her with a back up plan so that she wont lose any on her new pc. (usb sticks). use a free data backuo or cloud service. a lot of them now have 4-8g of free online storage. she should be able to back up a lot of family photos to online storage. most of the new software is one click or once it set up make daily..weekly or monthly backup of the folder you want saved.

Yes, original position was master. Tried CS as well as slave. No go.