Will not recognize old windows 7 hard drive

[silversweetz]

Guys,

Need your help. My laptop broke and i'm trying to retrieve some old photos on the hard drive that was the boot drive. I bought a USB 2.0 external housing but Windows 10 does not see it. I go to disk management and its not on there either. I can plug in its old "D" drive and it pops right up. Any suggestions?

 

[basroil]

Did "laptop broke" mean that the thing just quit working, or was there a specific issue? If you don't know why the laptop broke, it might have just been that the disk died, in which case you will not be able to recover that data yourself.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there silversweetz,

That is unpleasant.

Have you tried the enclosure on another system, which is not Win 10?
It is not really clear what you mean by old "D" drive.

If the enclosure is not recognized by another system as well, then you will need to attach the drive internally to a desktop machine.(you will need SATA + power cables)
If the drive operates fine, you should be able to access it right away.
If the drive does not appear under My Computer but it is recognized by Disk Management, you can use some data recovery tool: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD

 

[silversweetz]

Sorry guys, just got off a long day of work when I wrote that. It was an old HP DV9000 and the on board video card stopped working. I had the original hard drive WD 320 GB Scorpio Blue which had windows 7 loaded in one bay and another hard drive in the expansion bay. The laptop worked fine until the video quit. So I purchased a USB 2.0 external enclosure so I could get some family photos off the boot drive but windows 10 can't see it. The only other computer I have is a MacBook. I'm confident the hard drive is ok, I just don't understand why it doesn't pop up in My Computer when I plug it in.

 

[D_Know_WD]

It is strange that one of the drives appears but the other one does not.
So the drive is not recognized by Disk Management right? You can check Device Manager and BIOS as well. Is the drive even spinning up?

D_Know_WD