USB to ATA cable

[creative-2009]

I've been trying to attach an two old 60Gb Maxtor hard drives to my laptop in order to get some of the data from it. I purchased an IDE/SATA to USB cable, which I have been assured will do the job.

I have used this cable successfully to get data from a SATA hard drive, but have not been successful with either of the ATA drives. The cable provides a connector for ATA drives, so because of this and the advice I have been given I am working under the assumption that the cable is fit for this purpose.

When I first attached either of the hard drives Windows went through the usual detecting new hardware etc., and the hard drive is listed in the Device Manager. The drive is also listed in Disk Management, however it is not assigned a letter and the option to Change Drive Letter and Paths is greyed out.

I've tried restarting the laptop numerous times, unplugging and reattaching the hard drive, and even booting Windows with the hard drive attached. Does anyone have suggestions as to what I should do next?

I'm running Windows XP SP3, although I don't think I have all of the latest patches installed. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated, and I will do my best to answer any questions.

Thanks.

 

[house70]

Is this a 2.5 inch drive? Or a 3.5? The bigger ones have a power connector, as well. The 2.5 ATA usually is on PATA interface, which does not require separate power plug, but the adapter must be PATA compatible.

 

[creative-2009]

Hi, thanks for your reply. It's a 3.5 drive, I've got the power connector hooked up to the AC and the drive is spinning.

 

[house70]

I would try to hook it up as an internal drive inside a desktop. That way, if the HDD is OK, it WILL be recognized and you will be able to get the data from it.
I forgot to ask, what file system is it? Windows only sees FAT and NTFS.
Another option, you can download and burn a Ubuntu Live CD. Boot from the cdrom, run Ubuntu from the CD instead of installing it, and once launched, try to access the HDD from there. That way, you are using a different OS without installing it/altering the current laptop configuration.

 

[creative-2009]

Unforunately I don't have access to a desktop, however I've got a copy of Ubuntu lying around somewhere so will give that a go now.

Both the drives are NTFS. I've taken some screenshots in case they're of any use.

http://i886.photobucket.com/albums/ac61/creative-2009/ATA%20to%20USB/Image2.jpg

http://i886.photobucket.com/albums/ac61/creative-2009/ATA%20to%20USB/Image1.jpg

 

[creative-2009]

Managed to get it up and running using Ubuntu. The files open correctly and seem to be copying across to the Laptop harddrive.

Does that shed any light on why it isn't being recognised correctly within Windows? And, once I've copied my data over I'm hoping to use the drives for a bit of extra storage/back-up, am I right in thinking that the best thing to do would be to freshly format the drives from within Windows?

Many thanks!

 

[house70]

Good deal! Now, after you have copied the files, you can go ahead and initialise the drives again before formatting. That is similar to a low-level format that restores the HDD in a factory-clean state, similar to zeroing the HDD. I use killdisk for that, which can be run from a bootable CD or installed and run from PC. The free version allows to "kill" the disk, which is zeroing it. After that, you can re-initialise it and format it in whatever filesystem you prefer. Make sure you select the correct HDD to "kill', you don't want to do that to the system disk.
Good luck with this project, it should be a fun one.