IDE to USB harddrive adaptor problem - TechRepublic
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October 12, 2013 at 10:13 AM
igravestock

IDE to USB harddrive adaptor problem

by igravestock . Updated 12 years, 1 month ago

Hi,

I have two old IDE harddrives that I was looking to access some data from. I bought a USB IDE/SATA adaptor and easily accessed the Western Digital WD1600 drive. I am using a laptop running Windows 7 (Home edition). The drivers were identified installed and it worked simply as I had expected based on the Youtube videos etc I had read.

However, when I came to repeat this with the older Fujitsu MPF3014AT 20Gb drive the drive isn’t recognised. So I can see nothing in Disk Management in the Computer Management application and the drive doesnt seem to be recognised.

The drive spins & powers up, but the USB device doesnt seem to be recognised. The connector seems to connect to the IDE fine. The drive doesnt sound distressed.

So the things I have tried already are:

– rebooting and reconnecting the components in different orders, i.e. all connected at reboot, connect the adaptor only at reboot then the drive afterwards, etc
– changing the jumper settings from Master to Cable Select
– trying to connect to an iMac using MacOS to see if that was more successful
– had a good read of previous suggestions around similar problems or topics

As an alternative – if I cant make this work I would be interested in recommendations of UK based harddrive recovery firms that I could post this to and get the data by mailed back to me on a USB stick.

Thanks in advance

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