USB to Sata/IDE Adapter Help

D

DarkStar02

2[H]4U
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Mar 1, 2006
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I bought a Sabrent USB to SATA/IDE hard drive adapter and am trying to make the drive show in windows. The drive won't appear in the BIOS no matter what position I set the jumpers in (I've tried everything with 2 different drives). In Windows, I can make the drive show up in Disk Management but it says 'Disk 1, Unknown, Not Initialized'. When I right click it and hit initialize it comes up with a menu that lets me pick either MBR or GPT partition styles, both of which just give me the error "The device is not ready". I'm going crazy here trying to get the data off these old hard drives. I've tried switching USB ports and have tried plugging the adapter directly into a molex from my PSU instead of the provided power brick. The only thing I can think of is that these were primary HDD's off old laptops (C:\) so maybe the drive lettering might be confusing the Disk Management when trying to intialize another C drive?
 
When I right click it and hit initialize
Click to expand...
First things first DO NOT do that if you have data on the drive you wish to keep, afaict that will wipe out the parition table. Lukilly it seems to have failed in your case.

Can you please tell us exactly what adaptor you bought and exactly how you are connecting it?
 
plugwash said:
First things first DO NOT do that if you have data on the drive you wish to keep, afaict that will wipe out the parition table. Lukilly it seems to have failed in your case.

Can you please tell us exactly what adaptor you bought and exactly how you are connecting it?
Click to expand...

The adapter is a Sabrent USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE Hard Drive Adapter. I just got it from newegg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812156017

I turned off the computer, plugged in the power adapter, plugged the USB adapter into the computer, plugged the HDD into the USB adapter. Boot into BIOS, nothing shows. Boot into windows, unknown device shows in the device manager.

Good thing the initialize process didn't work!

PTNL said:
IDE or SATA on those drives?
Click to expand...

IDE
 
DarkStar02 said:
IDE
Click to expand...
Ah... This reminds me of past times where some laptop drives simply would not initialize on just the USB/IDE adapter's supplied power.

My solution may also work for you. I bought a 3.5"-to-2.5" IDE adapter, and plugged that inline on the normal sized IDE connector on my USB adapter. The 2.5"-to-3.5" adapter had an attached dedicated molex connection, which I connected the external molex power brick to (the power brick that came with my USB/SATA/IDE adapter). That seemed to give the laptop drive enough power to fully initialize and be detected within Windows.
(I hope that explanation makes sense.)

Whether or not the drive is visible from BIOS will depend more on your mobo's capability.
 
I tried booting with the drive plugged straight into my PSU and it lights up the IDE/Busy light but it still isn't recognized. Hmm.
 
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