markjason :
My one terrabyte drive stopped working few weeks back so i decided to get a sata cable. It plugs in power lights on on the cable but the access light isn't. Drive still not working and my lifes work is on there. There is also an eight pin port on my drive does that have some significance. I was told some tb drives dont work with some satas. My sata has two usb plugs on one end but im thinking i need something else plzzzz help
Helo Mark,
Firstly, let's clear some things up, as there seems to be a bit of confusion in your description of the problem.
1. SATA (serial ATA), is a standard for disk data connections, so when you say "My sata has two usb plugs", this doesn't really make sense. SATA is just the name of the standard for connecting your hard drive to a computer's motherboard or some other device, and the SATA cable looks like this:
2. The 8-pin you mentioned are probably the PATA jumpers, not really a connector. They are meant for setting up how you connect the drive (slave/master), but are pretty much useless nowadays and should be left alone. Does it look like this?
3. 1 Terabyte, or 1TB, is just the capacity of the drive, and hence bears no importance on whether it works or not with the chosen interface. If the drive and both the SATA and USB interfaces are working, it makes no difference how you connect, they should both work.
From what I could understand, you probably have a portable hard drive with both SATA (eSATA in this case) and USB connectors. If that's the case, you must mean you were using USB when it stopped working, and now you are trying to connect through the eSATA port.
Does the enclosure have a power supply? If so, connect it and check if the HDD makes any spinning noise. If the HDD is powering up but the drive does not show up in the computer, you have to make sure the eSATA port you are trying to use is actually enabled. To do this, you should boot up the computer and enter setup (usually press 'del' or F2 on startup). There, you should look for eSATA and make sure it is set to "enabled". If it is, it will probably show the drive information for the connected hard disk.
If this fails, and the disk is really important to you, you could try opening the enclosure and connecting the actual disk to the computer. A portable hard disk is basically a disk inside a cage with external connectors, you would be just removing the case, not messing with the drive itself, so you can't really damage the data. If you want to go ahead and do this, please tell us the exact model of the drive so we can walk you through the process.
Otherwise, if you don't feel savvy enough to open up the hard drive and connect it directly to the PC, then maybe professional tech support would be the best course.
I hope I understood you problem correctly, but if not, please try to explain the issue in more detail so we can try to help you better.