Old WD Hard drive

Internal Drives WD Blue
1

Hello, so a family computer has crashed. BSOD done?

Bought new computer and hooked up old HD in a External enclosure.

New Computer can see it but won’t let me access it or give it a Drive letter.

Used to be you can put a jumper across 2 of the 8 pins on the back to designate a slave drive?

I don’t remember which ones, any ideas? Other ideas about accessing the drive?

Thanks, Tom

1 Like
2

Jumper the drive as a master.

Can you show us a SMART report?

https://www.reddit.com/r/datarecoverysoftware/wiki/index/smart/

Can you show us the Partitions tab in DMDE?

https://dmde.com/

3

The Windows Disk Manager can show all partitions

4

Jumpers were mainly for older IDE drives, but if your old drive is SATA, no jumpers are needed. If the new PC sees the drive but won’t assign a letter, try Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) to assign one manually. If access is denied, take ownership via File Explorer → Properties → Security. If the drive is corrupted, try chkdsk or recovery software.

5

If your new PC sees the drive but won’t assign a letter or let you access it, open Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) and try assigning one manually. If you get an access denied error, take ownership by right-clicking the drive, going to Properties → Security, and adjusting permissions.

Check the drive’s health with CrystalDiskInfo or run wmic diskdrive get status in Command Prompt. If the drive shows as RAW or corrupted, data recovery software can help.

Also, jumpers only matter for IDE drives—if yours is SATA, you don’t need them. Hope this helps!