Trouble accessing a laptop hard drive from my PC

[Euphoreus]

I can’t access a laptop hard drive from my PC, which uses Vista. I bought a PSB 2.0 to SATA / IDE cable. I can access my old PC hard drive with it, but I’ve tried two different laptop hard drives and they don’t show up where all the other drives are accessed.

In Device Manager it does shows up under Disk drives as, “USB Device.” Do you know why the laptop hard drives won’t just “plug and play,” like my old PC hard drive does?

 

[rand_79]

laptop--ie 2.5" drives have integrated power pins maybe the usb device isnt powering it correctly?

 

[rodney_ws]

Rand_79 is on the right track I think. I have at my desk right now a USB to IDE adapter for 2.5 inch laptop drives... and it has an external power source feeding into it and that goes through the IDE interface to power the drive. To me that says that a humble USB port lacks the power necessary to spin up the drive.

I think something like this is what you need...

http://www.datapro.net/products/laptop-ide-hard-drive-adaptor.html

 

[Euphoreus]

My adapter does have an external power source.

I just did a bunch of updates for my Vista Home Edition and now for some reason I’m having the same problem with my old PC hard drive that I had with the laptop hard drives. Maybe a bug in Windows Vista is causing plug and play to malfunction. Also I installed service pack 2 for Vista but under my system description it says I’m running SP1. I tried to install SP2 again and it says it is already installed. DAMN VISTA!