I have two XP era HDD Western digital drives, I think one is 128 gigs (quaint) and one 256 gigs. They are in "metal gearbox" (a brand name) external hard drive cases and so, they've been reasonably well protected. They both show "proof of life" in that the light comes on and you here that gentle HDD whir on startup and they vibrate very slightly. They both transmit data through USB 2.0 A to B cables. These are pre-SATA HDDs. The data cable on the interior of the hard drive case looks very much like a motherboard power supply cable today: Long, skinny, lots of pins. But it feeds into a USB 2.0 output.
Three or four years ago I took all of my CDs, maybe 150 of them, and shipped them to a service that turns them into mp3s and also lossless formats. The service wanted me to provide a storage medium so I sent off the 128 gig metal gear box and got all these files (and the CDs) back in the metal gear box.
At that time I was running Win 8.1 and the transfer of the files to the hard drive was not problematic. And to my amazement Carbonite backs up the music files too.
So anyhow, I have recovered 99% of my data after a recent crash from Carbonite and for some unknown reason one of the lossless file directories appears to have been garbled or lost in the Carbonite restoration process.
So I decided to hook up the old trusty 128 gig metal gear box and nose around in its directory to see what was what. It is a known thing that this hard drive worked three or four years ago with Win 8.1, and it fired up, but Win 10 doesn't "see" it. It does not show in the disk management folder. There is no chirp notification when it is connected or disconnected.
I thought it might be a Win 10 thing so I took it upstairs where we're still running Win 8.1, but up there it also was not recognized by the 8.1 OS, even though my downstairs 8.1 OS had no problem with it a few years ago. I have not yet booted my son from his gaming to see whether the HDD shows in the upstairs 8.1 directory or the disk management, but I am not optimistic.
It is not out of the question that the units have not done well for lack of use these past six years and so perhaps they need to be tossed. But I wanted to make sure I'm not missing anything obvious. I don't even know what's on one of the external HDDs. I do know that there are, or at least were, music files on the other.
thanks,
Greg N
Three or four years ago I took all of my CDs, maybe 150 of them, and shipped them to a service that turns them into mp3s and also lossless formats. The service wanted me to provide a storage medium so I sent off the 128 gig metal gear box and got all these files (and the CDs) back in the metal gear box.
At that time I was running Win 8.1 and the transfer of the files to the hard drive was not problematic. And to my amazement Carbonite backs up the music files too.
So anyhow, I have recovered 99% of my data after a recent crash from Carbonite and for some unknown reason one of the lossless file directories appears to have been garbled or lost in the Carbonite restoration process.
So I decided to hook up the old trusty 128 gig metal gear box and nose around in its directory to see what was what. It is a known thing that this hard drive worked three or four years ago with Win 8.1, and it fired up, but Win 10 doesn't "see" it. It does not show in the disk management folder. There is no chirp notification when it is connected or disconnected.
I thought it might be a Win 10 thing so I took it upstairs where we're still running Win 8.1, but up there it also was not recognized by the 8.1 OS, even though my downstairs 8.1 OS had no problem with it a few years ago. I have not yet booted my son from his gaming to see whether the HDD shows in the upstairs 8.1 directory or the disk management, but I am not optimistic.
It is not out of the question that the units have not done well for lack of use these past six years and so perhaps they need to be tossed. But I wanted to make sure I'm not missing anything obvious. I don't even know what's on one of the external HDDs. I do know that there are, or at least were, music files on the other.
thanks,
Greg N