USB SATA IDE Adaptor - asking to format hardrives

[stevetro]

I needed to access hard drives (2 of them) from my old computer so I bought a Bipra USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE Adaptor. Had a few teething troubles detecting the drives but solved that. Only problem now both of them are saying I need to the format drives (does not contain a recognised file system). I definitely don't want to format as I'm trying to recover photos.

In Disk Management, it's saying the drives are RAW rather than NTFS like the other drives on my computer.

Not sure if matters but the old computer had a RAID array, hence the 2 hard drives.
New computer is Windows 10

Let me know if any other info needed, relative IT novice so speak slowly

 

[Archaic59]

Is this the adapter? http://www.amazon.com/Bipra-SATA-Adapter-Power-Drive/dp/B001A5SK56
- Supported Operating Systems: Windows ME/2000/XP/Vista/7, Mac OS 8.6 and above

 

[stevetro]

Is this the adapter? http://www.amazon.com/Bipra-SATA-Adapter-Power-Drive/dp/B001A5SK56
- Supported Operating Systems: Windows ME/2000/XP/Vista/7, Mac OS 8.6 and above

Yes that's the one.
So a Windows 10 issue perhaps?
I've got a Windows 7 laptop so could try on that

 

[Archaic59]

If the 2 drives were set up in raid 0 I think they would have to be returned to that configuration to be readable since the info is striped.

 

[stevetro]

Could you provide any pointers how to do that please? See "novice" above

Would that mean I'd need 2 of the Bipra adapters?

 

[Archaic59]

I'm no expert on raid either. I just know that the info is split between the drives, so it makes sense that they would have to be put back into raid 0 to read them. How to do it externally with adapters I have no clue. It would seem the easiest method would be to install them in a working system and setup into raid 0 temporarily in order to extract the info from them. If the drives were in raid 1 then they are a copy of each other and you should be able to read either drive with your adapter, but you have that windows version problem with the adapter. Sorry I know this isn't much help.

 

[stevetro]

I'm no expert on raid either. I just know that the info is split between the drives, so it makes sense that they would have to be put back into raid 0 to read them. How to do it externally with adapters I have no clue. It would seem the easiest method would be to install them in a working system and setup into raid 0 temporarily in order to extract the info from them. If the drives were in raid 1 then they are a copy of each other and you should be able to read either drive with your adapter, but you have that windows version problem with the adapter. Sorry I know this isn't much help.

No it's very helpful thanks.
Tried on Windows 7 laptop and same outcome.
So yeah I think it's RAID 0 related, and I may need one of these instead:
http://usb.brando.com/usb-esata-to-dual-sata-hdd-adapter-with-raid-support-otg_p01312c42d15.html

 

[Archaic59]

Wow that adapter was a good find. Let me know how it goes.