Hi all,
I’m trying to get rid of loads of old hard drives (man cave clearout) and while some of the old drives work, Windows 11 refuses to mount/access some of them.
Most of them are old SATA drives I just want to check/empty – and then throw away (after driling them out). I also have some very old IDE drives I want to do the same to – and I bought this little device for the IDE ones (and it works well for some of the IDE drives): https://tinyurl.com/5xdefc2c
However, for some of them (quite a lot), Windows refuses to access the drive through the Disk Management console.
On opening Disk Manager, it asks to initialise (and choose between GTP or MBR) and whichever I choose (GPT or MBR) it comes back with the same message:
“A device which does not exist was specified”
This is the same whether I add them via a SATA cable to the mboard, or try to read them via a 3.5 disk device reader which connects via USB.
Googling for answers seems to come back to a corrupt MBR sector – but of the 20 or 30 x 3.5 hdds and 5 x 2.5 hdds – half of them work, and half of them don’t.
That would seem to me to be a really high failure rate for so many drives.
And the ones that won’t initialise don’t seem to have motor or seek head issues – no dreaded clicking that heralds the EOL of a drive.
Screenshot 1: https://tinyurl.com/y2ttwjn6
Screenshot 2: https://tinyurl.com/mv5s9v49
The desktop I’m using is an HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF, OS Win11 64 bit latest May ’23.
So – any thoughts? Any help would be very gratefully received!
Many thanks in advance.