Drive not showing up

[piffelpop]

I am trying to retrieve some files from an old laptop drive via a USB to SATA adapter connected to a PC. The adapter light is on, the Drive is spinning, but the PC doesn't detect the drive. What should I do?

 

[Saga Lout]

If it wasn't a system disk in its former life, it may not have a fixed drive letter and if it was, it might think it's a C: drive and your PC already has one of those. That wold cause a conflict.

Go into Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management and if the disk is there, right click it and give it a drive letter and it should then show up in Windows Explorer.

 

[piffelpop]

It does appear in disk management, but I don't see the option to give it a drive letter...So...(1): Can you point elaborate on how to give it a Letter? and (2): I'm running Windows XP, thinking it might be a driver issue, but the PC is offline. Where can I download the proper Driver Update for a "USB Mass Storage Device", so I can manually update the driver by downloading it on another computer?

 

[Saga Lout]

Find the disk in the way I described above and there will be a list of disks and/or a block diagram of disks

Right click the one you want and you'll see a list of options, one of which is "Change Driver Letter and Paths"

Pick a letter - any letter - personally, I prefer to go for X or somewhere up that end of the alphabet to save confusion over what's internal and what isn't.

 

[piffelpop]

That's just the problem though - that option is not on the list!...Do you think it could be a driver issue? I am leary of downloading updated drivers for it because it is offline and I will have to somewhat manually install them, and even more so, I don't know for which driver I need... BTW, I really appreciate your help with this...I am in the process of doing a complete overhaul of every machine I have, setting up a VPN and server, and really stepping up my game with my IoT...it just so happens that this particular drive contains some very important data that I need before I can (or want to) proceed in my endeavor...

 

[piffelpop]

Also, I have two other ideas...A fresh OS install on the old machine, as it has already been scoured for anything I care about, OR, shouldn't I be able to just boot from the external drive, as it already has its own OS?

 

[Saga Lout]

If this disk was on my bench I would try it in the PC in place of the system disk of that machine. A SATA driver is just that and it should work in the converter but it could do no harm to try it in an internal SATA slot.