access old drive via sata-to-usb

[mholm1818]

I have a 1TB Western Digital drive with a damaged usb connector. It can't be fixed, as the little pins are bent way out of configuration. So I bought a sata to usb connector, unplugged the electronics from the actual drive and plugged the new connector to it.

I made Win8 see the drive via disc manager but it sees it as "raw" not ntfs and won't let me access the data already on it. Windows wants me to format it, but it's full of 2 years of pictures, music, documents, etc.

How do I make windows read the drive? I'm assuming that whatever WD has on the little board I removed tells the OS what the drive is, but I can't use that.

 

[popatim]

I trust that his has taught you that you always need backups of your important files.

Luckily you might get out of this one unscathed. it sounds like you have a corrupt partition table and need to recover it.
http://www.ptdd.com/

try partition recovery first, if that doesnt work you're looking at recovering your data.

 

[Carlota57634fg]

It sounds like you've got a RAW drive. The RAW drive problems often could be caused by many reasons, such as the virus infection, hard drive problem and even computer system problems.

Therefore, you are supposed to be careful for saving your data on this drive.

Download a data recovery program and try to restore all your pictures, music, documents, etc.

Read further information of restoring the inaccessible data for free from a RAW hard drive here:
freeware-fix.blogspot.com/2013/03/raw-hard-disk-recovery.html

And then, format this drive and see whether the RAW problem could be fixed.

Otherwise, you have to replace this drive.

Therefore, after this incident, you should always make data backups at least on two drives.

 

[mholm1818]

There is nothing wrong with the drive. It is a Western Digital external that attaches via usb. The usb port is damaged. Physically broken. Up to the second of the breakage, it functioned perfectly. The usb port is part of a small circuit board that plugs directly into the drive itself. If I could solder worth a damn, I'd take out the port on the little board and just replace it. But I'd like to just use the SATA-to-usb connector to access the files on the drive.

The instructions for the connector only list the process to install a new, blank drive. There has to be a process to get Windows to recognize the drive.

Does it mean that WD uses the drive as RAW somehow? To recover it, do I need a whole new drive? That's a lot of data to have to move. or can I somehow make it NTFS?

 

[gtgo]

I have a 1TB Western Digital drive with a damaged usb connector. It can't be fixed, as the little pins are bent way out of configuration. So I bought a sata to usb connector, unplugged the electronics from the actual drive and plugged the new connector to it.

I made Win8 see the drive via disc manager but it sees it as "raw" not ntfs and won't let me access the data already on it. Windows wants me to format it, but it's full of 2 years of pictures, music, documents, etc.

How do I make windows read the drive? I'm assuming that whatever WD has on the little board I removed tells the OS what the drive is, but I can't use that.

I have almost same problem, with trying to access old hadr drive on new lap top.. a) how did you make the disk manager see the old hard drive.. im on the screen, but don't see any unamesd drives. (as some threads instruct) b) do you need to format the old hrd drive . cuz new syst is windo 8 , old one was vista . thanks

 

[gtgo]

I trust that his has taught you that you always need backups of your important files.

Luckily you might get out of this one unscathed. it sounds like you have a corrupt partition table and need to recover it.
http://www.ptdd.com/

try partition recovery first, if that doesnt work you're looking at recovering your data.

hi, how to you make on the disk management, see the old drive thru usb/. I have the same problem except the old drive is not seen at all by the new laptop. thanks