BleepingComputer.com: Old Hard Drive in External Enclosure Not Recognized

Hello!

My family has this old internal hard drive, a WD400 Enhanced IDE, 40GB, with a date of 30 Sep 2003. It used to be in a PC running XP, but that machine bit the dust a while back, and I thought we might be able to get information off of the hard drive by purchasing an external enclosure and running the drive off our current PC, which uses Vista.

So we bought the enclosure, I hooked it up and plugged in the USB. The old drive powers up, and the Vista PC sort of acts like it recognizes the drive, but we still can't access the info on the drive. When I open up the "Safely Remove Hardware" window, it lists a USB Mass Storage Device as an "Initio WD400EB-11CPFO USB Device", but when I open the "Computer" window it does NOT list any drive corresponding to the old drive description.

Did I miss a step somewhere? Is this drive dead or does it not work the way I thought it did?

I posted some photos and screen shots that might help. Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks!

A screenshot from Disk Management...would be more useful, IMO.

Start/Run...type diskmgmt.msc and hit Enter.

Use Print Screen key to take an image...use image editor or Paint to create image (change to .jpg), then upload as attachment.

Louis

This post has been edited by hamluis: 17 July 2011 - 09:04 AM

Is the drive jumpered correctly? I believe to use it as a single drive you need to remove the jumper.

See here: WD400 Jumper Settings

This post has been edited by strolln: 17 July 2011 - 09:16 AM

Thanks. Removed jumper and found disk management. Here's a screen shot:



When I right click the Unallocated drive, one of the options is New Simple Volume. If I click that, will it erase all the data on the drive?

Well...it would be nice if you told us...all the options listed.

A drive that needs to be initialized...is one that cannot be used until you initialize it and format it.

How to Initialize a New Hard Drive eHow.com - http://www.ehow.com/how_4918155_initialize-new-hard-drive.html

Louis

lawade, on 17 July 2011 - 04:26 PM, said:

Yes. It appears like the original partition info has been lost. Before you create a partition or format that drive you may want to try a program like Easeus Partition Recovery Software Not sure if it can help in this case but if the original data is important then it's worth a try. If the data was really important then you may need to find a professional data recovery service to see if they can recover the data.

This post has been edited by strolln: 17 July 2011 - 05:55 PM

I apologize. I'm not particularly hardware literate. The only other options listed for the drive when I right click, are Properties and Help. New Spanned Volume and New Striped Volume are grayed out.

I don't think me or my family are that keen on reusing the drive, but we were mainly looking to just get the data off it. I will try Easeus. If we need to, we know of a professional recovery service where we can take the drive.

This post has been edited by lawade: 17 July 2011 - 06:20 PM