External Hard Drive Enclosure

[mewsik_man]

Hello,

I've read through the forum and haven't found any help with my problem.

The problem: I have a 2003 120GB 3.5 IDE hard drive. I bought an enclosure and successfully installed the hard drive, however, when I plug the USB cable into my laptop, my laptop doesn't show the external drive in the file explorer. The drive is however recognized in disk management, but I'm unable to assign a drive letter to the external drive.

I know the hard drive is in good condition. It was the motherboard that died. I do not want to format the drive as I have data on it that I would like to recover.

Would anyone be able to talk me through the steps of getting my Windows 10 laptop to recognize the external drive so that I can explore the files in file explorer?

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there mewsik_man,

I believe this is an enclosure that has a separate power cord right? If this is not the case and you have just a USB cable, you will need to get an enclosure with both USB and power cables.

Apart from that, if the enclosure is for 3.5'' drives and has a power cord, my suggestion would be to start with just attaching the drive to another system, that is not on Win 10. That way you will see if there's something wrong with your laptop (drivers) or there's something wrong with the enclosure.

Could you provide a screenshot of Disk Management? Just upload the screen to an image hosting website and post the link.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD