Connect External Hard Drive to SATA

[kdhynes45]

I have a Western Digital External Hard Drive that was not working. I found online how to take it apart and just pull out the drive part. It has an SATA connection. I have an extra tower in my house running Windows XP and was going to plug it into there to try to pull the data off the hard drive. Everything in the computer uses IDE except the CD/DVD drive that uses SATA. I unplugged the working CD/DVD drive and used those connections for the hard drive. However, the computer does not see the hard drive in either Windows or in the Bios. How can I change the computer to either read both IDE and SATA or SATA only. I have changed the Bios IDE Configuration setting to P-ATA and S-ATA but this doesn't seem to cause any changes.

Any help would be appreciated!! Thanks so much!

 

[jossrik]

It should read both, sounds like your HDD is dead. You could try a USB to SATA device to hook it up to the computer while the PC is running, but really, it sounds dead.

 

[kdhynes45]

Thanks jossrik. That's what I was afraid of.