HDD SATA unreadable

[tempt6]

Hi there,

I am trying to find out what's in an old laptop's hard disk.
It's a SATA 2.5'' Hitachi Travelstar, from a Acer Travelmate, so it's probably 5-8 years old. it probably had Windows XP on it.
I plugged it into an external HDD reader (which reads 3.5'' disks so I used a $1 Adapter 2.5'' to 3.5''), that can be plugged via USB to something else like another PC

I tried to view what's on it through Windows 7, but it just says an alert box, saying that I need to format the disk before using it.

I then tried to view it via Ubuntu, but again I can't explore anything.
The command

lsusb

gives the following line when it's plugged :

Bus 001 Device 014: ID 152d:2338 JMicron Technology Corp. / JMicron USA Technology Corp. JM20337 Hi-speed USB to SATA & PATA Combo Bridge

That line seems to be about the SATA-USB Adapter and not the disk itself. I googled up that, and found Ubuntu forums someone had also issues with reading his disk. One of the answer was So there seems to be some incompatibility between the adapter and some types of hard drives

I don't really know what to do with this hard disk. Is it empty, is it broken, is it my adapter that can't read it.
Any advice is welcome ! Thanks

 

[joex444]

That command just prints out what is connected via USB, and the SATA bridge is exactly what should've been reported. To see what's on the disk, you'll probably want to run the Disks program in Ubuntu - it should bring up whatever is available and show the partition information. You should at least get the partition data and file format (NTFS, FAT32, etc) information.

Sometimes USB converters are weird and you need to format before you can use the disk. If you can't get any information, then I suggest directly connecting it to a spare SATA port and ensuring that your system doesn't try to boot from it.

Of course... it may be blank or dead.