laptop hard drive help

[waytoosmall]

Fixing friends laptop. Old hard drive would not boot any longer so I replaced it, reinstalled windows etc... I took the old hard drive and put it into a 2.5" hard drive enclosure expecting that though it wouldn't boot, I should still be able to pull files off it if it was just seen as an extra external drive. When I plug in the USB cable, it powers up, and I can feel it spinning, but the drive never gets recognized by the computer. The sound you usually hear under XP when something gets plugged in through USB never happens and the drive does not show up in My Computer. To get data recovered professionally will be ~$700 so I doubt he wants to do that. Does anyone have any ideas of what I could do to try and just get it working long enough to pull data off? Thank you for any advice.

 

[Lexluethar]

Difficult to say. First try another enclosure or USB adapter for the hard drive. Ensure it isn't your cabling/adapter that is faulty.

If you've determined that isn't the issue, then it could be that the hard drive's allocation table is shot, and you would need software to recapture the data off the drive. Someone else can point you in the direction of some good recovery software.

But your drive should DEFINATELY be coming up on XP, so it shoulds like the adapter is shot. I had a few bad laptop drives that were totally crapped out, but XP and Vista could still recognize them as mass storage devices, i just couldn't open the drive.

 

[joeten]

re the recovery software you could take a look here freeware recovery software - Google Search hope you find something to help