Internal HD SATA II is not detected by hard drive dock

[Bulle_67]

I have an old Dell Dimenson 8400 computer that doesn't power up anymore. I think it has a problem with the power supply or the mother board. In this computer I had 2 hard drives, a primary 320 GB Western Digital (used for OS and program installation) and a secondary Seagate 750 GB (7200.10) HD used mostly for DATA storage.

Some time before the computer refused to power up, it was having trouble detecting the secondary Seagate HD. I made some tests and figured that the power supply or data connection to that HD was probably bad; since the Seagate was detected when I plugged it in the primary position. I decided to disable the Seagate HD because it wasn't detected by the computer, so I changed the BIOS setteings so that the SATA1 port assigned to the Seagate 750 GB wasn't defined anymore.

Now that the old computer is lost I want to recover my data stored on the Seagate, so I purchased a Nexstar hard drive dock to be able to use the internal HD with my laptop computer.

When inserting the 750 GB in the HD dock it shows no device (not even a sound from the HD). So I put in my old primary HD and everything worked just fine with that drive. So I guess the HD dock is working properly, but I need to know what's wrong with the 750 GB Seagate as this was my DATA disk!!

Can anyone help me in reviving / recovering my Seagate HD, it has valuable data (pictures and home movies) that has not been backed up (bad me I know).

The drive never clicked or have corrupt error messages. It always worked fine until that old computer just didn't detect it anymore.

Any Help is greatly appreciated.

 

[bavman]

Have you tried cleaning the connections out? Use some compressed air to clean out the sata and power plug. Theres not much to do with broken harddrives to fix them. The only way to get your data back from a harddrive that doesnt work anymore is to take it to a company that specializes in data recovery, but thats very very very expensive.

 

[Bulle_67]

I've read somewhere that it might be possible to replace the circuit board of the HD if it was the culprit for the drive not working anymore. How would I know if this was the case? Is there a test I can do? Also could it be that the drive was working on a windows XP system and my laptop is Vista?

 

[bavman]

Your os won't effect if a drive will work or not since its controlled by hardware first. There is an HDD enthusiast forum around the internet somewhere (forgot what its called). They might be able to help you identify the problem, and I know they do a lot of circuit board swapping, so ask there if you can.