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Windows wont detect my external hard drive

3K views 6 replies 3 participants last post by  Networks 
#1 ·
While looking for a mouse in the basement I found two of my very first hard drives. They were IDE so I didn't have anything to power them. So last week I bought an USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE cable on Amazon. Plugged the hard drive in and it took very long to open the folders but eventually I got it open to recover everything I wanted.

After which, I tried to reformat. Neither the normal right click format or CMD would allow me to reformat it. Last night, I ran a format with KILLDISK and it had bad sectors across the board it seemed from the log.

Eventually between unplugging and plugging in, windows no longer will see the drive when it's plugged in. Is the drive dead now? When plugged in it spins and sounds like a normal operating hard drive, but will not popup anywhere on my pc anymore. I have right clicked on My Computer, went to MANAGE and then looked under the drives, but it doesn't show it.

Anything I can do to fix this? I have even plugged it into my Laptop and still wont show there either.

The hard drive is a Western Digital WD Caviar Enhanced IDE HD WD1200, 120 GB

The plug cap in on SLAVE.

Thanks in advance!
 
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#2 ·
I am by no means an expert on the matter but I have had dozens of external HD problems.

Different strategies:
If you hear it spinning, perhaps you should just keep trying to mount/unmount. This has worked for me on an old LaCie.

I bought a cheap HD enclosure (rocket fish) and had some luck with some of the drives.

In my mind, if you had accessed the drive before (granted it was slow) it is not yet dead. I would just try to narrow it down (drive or enclosure.)

Good luck.
 
#3 ·
Based on the age and other factors you have posted it sounds like the drive has died and no you can't "fix" a bad hard drive its called data recovery at best then into the recycle pile and buy a new drive why would you want to trust your data on such an old drive anyway the 500gb drives are now in the 50.00 range.
 
#5 ·
Sir someone has to be the bearer of bad news and I know we all hate to hear what we don't want to hear I wont continue to defend my expertise in this particular area but I am confident in my diagnosis based on your reported information. I see this all day long again WHY use such an old drive for potentially valuable data its just not worth the risk in my professional opinion. I am out of this thread best of luck
 
#6 · (Edited)
Telling me to buy a new drive doesn't help me fix a potentially good hard drive whether its 10 or 15 years old. The fact of it is, I needed help fixing it and instead of giving me some advice like Leea934 said, you tell me to buy a new one.

Why use an old hard drive? Well, people aren't made of money. You got to use what you have.

Good luck with this site, I wont be back. :wave:
 
#7 ·
In your initial post you requested confirmation if the drive is dead ! I am confirming that. You really can't fix hard drives they fail if your lucky like you were you can recover the data it was working until it died the killdisk and all the errors were clue #2 the slowness was #1 now it doesn't show up in bios #3 wave! We will be here if you need us for a long time to come.
 
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