External Hard Drive doesn't even show up as a drive

[stenbot]

I have a seagate 3tb external hard drive. My daughter got a hold of it and broke the piece that converts the sata to a usb. I took the hard drive out of the case and am using a converter. I know the converter is not the problem because I have used it on other hard drives.
At first windows said it did not recognize the file system, so in the process of converting the file system to ntfs my computer did an unexpected restart. Now whenever I plug in the hard drive I can hear it spin up and know that it is running but windows or linux does not recognize that there is an external hard drive connected.
All the data recovery tools that I have looked at say to select the drive that has the data to be recovered, but how do I select a drive that I can't even select because it doesn't even show up in windows?
Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there stenbot,

I believe the converter is for a 3.5'' drive and has a power cord right?

How is the drive recognized by Disk Management?
Unfortunately, if the data is really important, it seems that you will need to contact a data recovery company. If the drive is attached correctly and no of the data recovery tools recognizes it, then you don't really have many options.

I believe it will not hurt to attach it internally to a desktop machine.

Let me know in case you have some more questions,
D_Know_WD

 

[stenbot]

Hi there stenbot,

I believe the converter is for a 3.5'' drive and has a power cord right?

How is the drive recognized by Disk Management?
Unfortunately, if the data is really important, it seems that you will need to contact a data recovery company. If the drive is attached correctly and no of the data recovery tools recognizes it, then you don't really have many options.

I believe it will not hurt to attach it internally to a desktop machine.

Let me know in case you have some more questions,
D_Know_WD

Thanks for the reply,
It is a 3.5" drive and the converter does have a power cable. Unfortunately the drive doesn't even show up in disk management. I will try to attach it internally today to see if that makes any difference. If that doesn't work I'll just take the hit and take it to a data recovery company.
Thanks!