unrecognized hard drive

[David_454]

I have this hard drive that's about 8 years old that I used with an old windows XP system. It has a bunch of old pictures that I am trying to transfer to a thumb drive to get printed. Every time i connect it to my pc though it isn't shown on the device manager or anything. I've looked in the bios and it shows up but for some reason windows doesn't recognize it as being connected. I also tried seeing if ubuntu would read it but it came up with some error. I know you can pay to get the discs swapped to another hard drive but I was wondering if there was any way to fix it without spending the money. My current system has windows 8.1 and the hard drive is a maxtor 320gb sata

 

[David_454]

MERGED QUESTION
Question from David_454 : "unrecognized hard drive"

I have this hard drive that's about 8 years old that I used with an old windows XP system. It has a bunch of old pictures that I am trying to transfer to a thumb drive to get printed. Every time i connect it to my pc though it isn't shown on the device manager or anything. I've looked in the bios and it shows up but for some reason windows doesn't recognize it as being connected. I also tried seeing if ubuntu would read it but it came up with some error. I know you can pay to get the discs swapped to another hard drive but I was wondering if there was any way to fix it without spending the money. My current system has windows 8.1 and the hard drive is a maxtor 320gb sata

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there David_454,

That is really unpleasant.

So this is an internal drive, that is connected as a secondary one right?
Is it attached internally or externally?

Make sure that you've attached both SATA and power cables (if internally) or SATA to USB adapter + power cord (if 3.5'' drive attached externally) properly.

See if the drive is recognized by Disk Management.

If the drive is not recognized over there and taking into account the other things you've tried (Ubuntu approach), then I don't think there's much you can do except for looking for some professional help.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD