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2.5" Notebook hard drive crash

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by philbert513

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Hi everyone, I'm having a bit of a problem here. I have a 60 GB toshiba notebook hard drive that is no longer under warranty. I was using my laptop when one day it decided not to boot up once again. So, I purchased an external 2.5" notebook hard drive enclosure to see if I could salvage a few files on said hard drive. When I connect the hard drive enclosure to my desktop, Windows chimes in saying that there is new hardware found and I see the icon for a Generic USB Disk USB device is there, but it will not recognize in My Computer. I have tried checking for its presence using Disk Management, a drive letter does not show up. In device manager, the USB device is listed there, and in its properties, I went to Volume and clicked on the populate button. Nothing shows up and get an unknown disk type and unreadable status on my drive. Does anyone have any insight as to what I can do to perhaps salvage this drive? Sending it to a data recovery place is the absolute last desperate attempt to get this resolved, I am hoping for another resolution. Thank you all in advance.

11 replies

by hal 9000

The refit it to the USB Caddy and try again.

It should work properly now but if you had a Password on the old system you'll need to take ownership of the files by following the directions here

http://tinyurl.com/3aw7

You may also need to adjust the Desktop to show Hidden Folders so you can get to all your data and if you had XP Pro installed and where using the Windows Encrypted File System you'll need to save a copy of the Encryption Key by following the directions here

http://tinyurl.com/3cd8hf

If you have some Third Party Encryption Software you'll need to read the manual for the correct Directions on saving the Encryption Key.

Col

by philbert513

Hello, there, thank you for the suggestion, however, there is no jumper on the hard drive. I've connected my hard drive to a Rosewill brand external 2.5" caddy, and it's a straight forward IDE pin connector. The file system for my hard drive is NTFS, and it was not encrypted..

by hal 9000

To a USB enclosure there are 4 pins not connected to the IDE Interface and it is on these 4 pins that you'll find the jumper. I've yet to see a HDD with a jumper on it work correctly when fitted to a USB Enclosure. If you look at the picture here you can see 2 pins on the bottom not connected and that is the way that things should be.

http://tinyurl.com/2p8ezd

If this is how the drive is then you have a faulty drive and will need to send it to a Data recovery House if the Data is important. However this isn't cheap and the data needs to be worth the effort in recovering.

Col

by bit - twiddler

Great insights and advice HAL (as usual). I agree and suspect it is simply a jumper issue.

While some more info about the original HD failure would be helpful (did it grind then smoke? or just "simple" data corruption?)in pinpointing the actual issue here, I respectfully offer my own ideas.

If it is in fact a hardware failure, for example the reading arm is seized, the drive motor failed, the onboard controller is fried, etc...you get the idea. If this is the case, about the only thing I know would be to send it off, so they can physically mount the actual "disk" in a working environment.

Cases like this are very rare however.

It would seem your windows is detecting the hard drive controller(the USB one which came with the enclosure, not the one built into the drive itself), but it is not actually detecting the drive itself.

Most likely, your drive is set as a primary/master, but should now be set to a "slave" setting, as an external HD.

You can find the proper jumper settings in the technical specs for that particular drive, available from the manufacturers web site.

If setting this drive as a slave has no effect, then it could be an actual hardware issue.

While I have had limted experience with 3rd party hard drive recovery software, my understanding is that SPIN-RITE from Gibson Research (GRC.com)has performed exceptionally well in these types of cases.

Also diagnostic tools like "Micro-Scope" or other hardware testing tools might be in order to better establish if it is in fact hardware failure.

Try messing with the jumpers first though. I would be suprised if that doesnt fix it.

Cheers!

by bit - twiddler

Great insights and advice HAL (as usual). I agree and suspect it is simply a jumper issue.

While some more info about the original HD failure would be helpful (did it grind then smoke? or just "simple" data corruption?)in pinpointing the actual issue here, I respectfully offer my own ideas.

If it is in fact a hardware failure, for example the reading arm is seized, the drive motor failed, the onboard controller is fried, etc...you get the idea. If this is the case, about the only thing I know would be to send it off, so they can physically mount the actual "disk" in a working environment.

Cases like this are very rare however.

It would seem your windows is detecting the hard drive controller(the USB one which came with the enclosure, not the one built into the drive itself), but it is not actually detecting the drive itself.

Most likely, your drive is set as a primary/master, but should now be set to a "slave" setting, as an external HD.

You can find the proper jumper settings in the technical specs for that particular drive, available from the manufacturers web site.

If setting this drive as a slave has no effect, then it could be an actual hardware issue.

While I have had limted experience with 3rd party hard drive recovery software, my understanding is that SPIN-RITE from Gibson Research (GRC.com)has performed exceptionally well in these types of cases.

Also diagnostic tools like "Micro-Scope" or other hardware testing tools might be in order to better establish if it is in fact hardware failure.

Try messing with the jumpers first though. I would be suprised if that doesnt fix it.

Cheers!

by philbert513

my notebook was working fine and dandy, when one day, I accidentally set my notebook a little rougher than normal...essentially what happened is that I got the ol' blue screen, as rare as it can appear with Win XP, so I shut down the lappy, and tried to restart. At first, it would not recognize the drive, so I waited for a little while longer. When I tried to restart it later, my computer seemingly returned to normal, and I even did a scan disk to check for bad sectors and errors. Nothing to report from that. Then finally, the hard drive would not boot all together. As I replied to Hal's posting, my hard drive does not have any jumpers connected to my external hard drive caddy, which is made by the company Rosewill. I am trying to recover my data using my desk top computer now, which is running Windows XP Prow/ service pack 2. My notebook HD is from a Dell computer and has Windows XP Pro, as well. Only the other day is when I noticed a sound emminating from the Hard drive caddy, as I describe as a whining up, whining down noise...as if something was trying to spin and suddenly stopping. Hope that gives some better understanding of the situation...

by bit - twiddler

Great insights and advice HAL (as usual). I agree and suspect it is simply a jumper issue.

While some more info about the original HD failure would be helpful (did it grind then smoke? or just "simple" data corruption?)in pinpointing the actual issue here, I respectfully offer my own ideas.

If it is in fact a hardware failure, for example the reading arm is seized, the drive motor failed, the onboard controller is fried, etc...you get the idea. If this is the case, about the only thing I know would be to send it off, so they can physically mount the actual "disk" in a working environment.

Cases like this are very rare however.

It would seem your windows is detecting the hard drive controller(the USB one which came with the enclosure, not the one built into the drive itself), but it is not actually detecting the drive itself.

Most likely, your drive is set as a primary/master, but should now be set to a "slave" setting, as an external HD.

You can find the proper jumper settings in the technical specs for that particular drive, available from the manufacturers web site.

If setting this drive as a slave has no effect, then it could be an actual hardware issue.

While I have had limted experience with 3rd party hard drive recovery software, my understanding is that SPIN-RITE from Gibson Research (GRC.com)has performed exceptionally well in these types of cases.

Also diagnostic tools like "Micro-Scope" or other hardware testing tools might be in order to better establish if it is in fact hardware failure.

Try messing with the jumpers first though. I would be suprised if that doesnt fix it.

Cheers!

by gopal saini

Hi Buddy, You have done all these thing correctly but the thing is that ur partition format is not supported. Ist format the from disk management and do it properly. U don't need to make partitions just take a single partition and use it then reboot ur system. Then u'll see all these thing are ok

by hdrc

Hi, i think there is no other solution other than attempting some good data recovery centre. Thats the final solution i think.So , if i suggest you then i must tell you to visit this website www.hdrconline.com I heard a lot about this company. So , why dont to check with this. I'm sure you'll get what you want.
tenz

by henry18

I do a lot of disk cloning using Ghost 8.3 with great success. And more importantly for you laptop guys go to your computer store and buy an IDE to Laptop IDE converter. They are very cheap and I have two of them that allows me to copy from one IDE Laptop drive to another on an old (P4 2400mhz)computer I have set aside for doing this. Cloning SATA hard disks is no problem with this special machine with SATA normal cabling on the more modern laptop SATA drives. Ghost 8.3 works just fine for me. But you do have to take the laptop drive out of the machine to do this. Very fast clones this way. I have all but given up on writing to DVD disks as it is very time consuming and slow. Can be useful on the first load of a new not updated Windows XP copy when first registered with MSoft. this can save you long calls to India from NZ. I even have a older copy of Ghost multitasking version and I am able to make copies from one more machine to yet another one that allows me to burn DVD disks for achiving. Very handy to have a DVD that will multitask back to a hard disk and then ghost to the 2.5 IDE laptop drive as I did only two days ago. In short I am into all this stuff. Cheers Henry

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