Seagate Momentus 5400.3 100GB IDE connecting through a USB to IDE cable problem.

[Hanelia]

Hey guys!

My friend asked me to have a look at his laptop which is pretty busted, but I at least want to try and recover his data, after removing the Hard Drive and seeing it was this one I purchased a USB to IDE cable.

All seems well until I look at the drive and can't figure out how to power the damned thing.

Any ideas?

 

[bootcher]

You tried using the external power adapter that came with the cable you purchased?

 

[Solandri]

2.5" IDE laptop drives only needed 5V to run (the desktop drives use both 5V and 12V). Consequently, power is supplied through a couple of the IDE pins (the 2.5" IDE connector is different from the 3.5" IDE connector).

If the kit you bought is for 3.5" IDE drives, you will need an adapter like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119245

If it's designed to work with 2.5" IDE drives, it should be routing USB power to the correct pins.

 

[Hanelia]

I can't see where to plug in anything apart from the IDE connection. Other side of the adapter is a 40 pin, on top is a SATA L connection.

 

[bootcher]

The kit is described as being able to connect to both 2,5" as 3,5" and sata. In your case the 2,5" drives do not require an extra power cable, they get their power directly from the 2,5" connection. So the usb connection should be able to power up the drive, unless the drive itself is broken. Another possibility might be your pc setting on the USB ports, specifically the setting that limits the power of the USB drives. Sometimes this is caused by a power saving setting in windows, sometimes this can be set in the BIOS.

 

[Hanelia]

Ok so with just the IDE plugged in the drive starts spinning, but it's not recognised by windows, it was recognised in my friends laptops BIOS though, would this still suggest a busted drive?

 

[Solandri]

Ok so with just the IDE plugged in the drive starts spinning, but it's not recognised by windows, it was recognised in my friends laptops BIOS though, would this still suggest a busted drive?

Was this a Toshiba laptop? For a while, Toshiba had a hard-on for Intel's RAID support and configured all their laptop HDDs as RAID even though there was only one HDD. To recover the data, you would need to get the drive back into a Toshiba laptop with RAID support and set its BIOS to RAID mode.

It might also work if you've got an older motherboard with Intel RAID support for IDE drives. I have no idea how you would get around this over USB. I had a 2004 Toshiba laptop that did this and never found another way to make the drive work outside the laptop without reformatting it (in fact it was impossible to install Windows on the laptop unless the drive was in RAID mode).