How to Do A Data Recovery on an IDE Hard Drive

[lello01]

I have a 60GB IDE Laptop Hard Drive. I don't want to format it. I just want to recover the data from the actual hard drive itself. I don't have a laptop that takes IDE hard drives, so I've purchased the whole External IDE Enclosure for the hard drive. I've plugged in the USB to the computer, you can hear the IDE hard drive working and powering up but nothing appears on the desktop screen of the computer and nothing appears on the computer folder. I've gone into device manager to see if anything appears or if the computer has recognised it. The device manager has recognised the hard drive but it has one of those yellow exclamation/question marks next to the hard drive.

So my question is, how do I resolve this issue and do a complete data recovery from my ide hard drive?

 

[OhSnapWord]

What are the jumper settings on the drive? You may have to make sure that it is set to Master or Single Drive.

 

[lello01]

I did try what you suggested I should do and its appeared on the "my computer" folder but the problem is it wont let me access it or let me into it. and error message keeps coming up and this is the message I keep getting [which I've copied and pasted into paint]

 

[lello01]

is there another way of doing it to get around that error message?

 

[OhSnapWord]

It seems like the drive controller is bad. If you have a working drive that is identical, you might be able to switch the controller board.

 

[lello01]

Sorry for the late reply. Haven't been able to get around to this. Yeah that's the thing I dont have another ide or an identical one to swap around

 

[evan.briggs]

have you looked into getting like a boot cd like hirens? or a linux program like partedmagic? i would look into those, burning them to a disk and try viewing the HDD with it.

 

[IAntDemo]

Briggs suggested what I was about to suggest, download a lite linux live cd and you can look inside the system, even with a faulty HDD, it may say it's faulty but I bet linux still picks up bits and bats, windows isn't unlocked like LINUX is , so +1 for linux tip.

 

[evan.briggs]

very true! linux OS's always work best for faulty hard drives. and what you can also do is if you get hirens it has good harddrive checks with the os.

 

[lello01]

I've downloaded and burnt it to a CD and had a bit play with it. Which selection in the menu do you go into to hdd or to recover it?