My notebook has an electrical issue, and is under warranty, however, when I send it back to the manufacturer, they always format the hard drive, so I attempted to use my USB to IDE kit to save my data onto my desktop. I put everything together, I get a message saying "your new hardware is installed and ready to use" however the disk doesn't appear in "my computer" or in any of the other lists of connected drives. I unplug it, reboot, plug it in again, same result.

Possible Problems I've already considered:

Nonfunctional USB/IDE kit: The kit works when I hook it to my CD burner, but just to be sure I was totally eliminating the problem, I purchased a new one today solely designed for laptop hard drives.

Damaged Hard Drive:
I thought this may be an issue too, as the electrical issue may have fried some of my components, I tried the same kits with another laptop HD I know to be functional, however I encountered the same problem.

Any Help would be greatly appreciated.

-ks

8/1/2005 10:14:56 PM

is the hard drive formatted?

8/1/2005 10:30:37 PM

wouldn't formatting the hard drive erase all of my data?

8/1/2005 11:04:52 PM

he's asking if the new drive (external) you are trying to copy to is formatted....you can go to control panel, administrative tools, logical disk manager to see the physical drives present (they will show up if they are partitioned and formatted here) and from here you can partition, format, and assign a drive letter and begin backing up your current laptop harddrive....in other words, you have 2 physical drives. You're formatting the new drive to take the data from the old (laptop) drive.

8/1/2005 11:11:21 PM

sorry for not being clear on this earlier, but I have data on the laptop hard drive that I would like to keep, I'm trying to copy data from the notebook hard drive to my desktop hard drive, the external drive IS in fact the laptop hard drive.

[Edited on August 1, 2005 at 11:34 PM. Reason : elaboration]

8/1/2005 11:34:02 PM

do you have to send the hdd back?
I take mine out when I send in my laptop for repairs
unless, ofcourse, its the hdd thats damaged..

you could try plugging it into another computer
it should just be recognised as an external disk, no matter if its a laptop or desktop drive..

8/2/2005 12:25:54 AM

you know, i thinks that what ill do

8/2/2005 12:29:11 AM

*think that's what ill do.*^


it has been brought to my attention by DoubleDown that it may be a compatibility issue b/t the USB 2.0 of the external hardware and the USB 1.0 port on the comp, makes sense.

8/2/2005 9:47:22 AM

So it seems I'm in the same boat all over again. I never resolved this issue from last time, I just gave up on the concept. I've got a new computer and I'd like to transfer the data from my hold hard drive. I'm having the same problem again, any fresh ideas on how I can solve it?

9/29/2005 10:17:24 AM