Hey guys, I didn't really know where to put this topic on but i guessed it was somehow related to hardware. Recently, my laptop wouldn't boot up, like it would turn on but just couldn't make it past the windows loading screen. Its around 5 years old, so pretty ancient and i have photos on the hard drive that i forgot to back up. So i searched around the web, and found out i could get an external hdd 2.5" enclosure. So i popped out the laptop's hdd and slid it into the enclosure and plugged it into one of my pcs usb port but nothing shows up, my pc can't even find the device so i was wondering if you guys had any solutions or similar problems that have happened to you as well. The laptop was a seagate model with a vista OS and the hdd was a 320gb wd scorpio (blue?), while my pc has a windows 7 OS, so i don't know if its simply not compatible or not. The enclosure is a coolermaster xport 251. Hope all this info helps guys. Thank you all.
He's already mentioned that, he's connecting it via an external USB enclosure. It sounds really obvious but are you sure the drive is getting powered up? Can you hear/feel it spin up when you plug it into the USB port on your PC? If your laptop was showing the Windows loading screen it means that the drive is definitely not (or at least wasn't) dead... so it may just be that you haven't connected it to the Coolermaster xport 251 correctly. I have the SATA-USB circuit out of a Western Digital passport drive that I often use to connect 2.5" drives to USB, I'm not sure if the Xport is the same but it just requires a mini USB-USB connection and no additional power, and it works every single time. Check the connection to the drive in the enclosure and make sure the power and data ports are securely connected.
Try right-clicking on Computer (either on the desktop or from the start menu) then click on Manage. Once the Computer Management window loads, click on Disk Management under Storage and it should list all the connected drives in your computer. If it shows your usb drive (you'll get an idea from the size of the drive) but there's no drive letter assigned to it, right click where the drive letter should be and select 'Change Drive Letter and Paths' and go through the wizard to assign a drive letter to it. Or, it could be you need a usb cable with an extra usb power lead on it, i.e. you plug the PC end into two usb ports. I.e:
Thank you! The hdd finally registered after i went onto disk management and refreshed the pc for any other connections. Thank you for all your help/
