My pretty old computer running XP died (motherboard failure) last week, and the new Dell doesn’t allow for an EIDE drive internally. So I got an enclosure let me use my old drives as externals. The enclosure works fine with my old Maxtor drive, but the computer doesn’t recognize my WD, which naturally has ALL my data on it.
The enclosure says the drive should be set as a master, and I’ve done so, but the pc doesn’t see it.
I’m hoping someone here with more knowledge than I obviously have can help.
Update: I downloaded and installed the Data Lifeguard Diagnostic program, and am able to see the drive connected by USB, and to run the quick test. However, the program shows no information regarding the drive contents.
These are the instructions to take over ownership of a drive on XP however they should be same on Vista.
What you should do is open up “My computer” on vista. Right click the drive you are trying to access (the one in the enclosure). Click “Sharing and Security” - Click Security Tab - Click Advance - Click Owner Tab. Highlight your information and check “replace owner on subcontainers and objects” - Click Ok.
At this point it should run through the entire drive and replace the previous permission with your current one so that you can access it.
First of all, the new computer is running W7, not Vista. Second, I can’t right click on the drive, because it’s apparently invisible to Windows. Doesn’t show up under My Computer at all.
The drive is in an external enclosure (I’ve tried two different ones) connected via USB to my W7 computer. An older Maxtor is visible and accessible in either of the two enclosures, and the WD diagnostic program “sees” the drive and scans it successfully, but I can’t access any of the information on it from any program on the computer.
Also, Device Manager recognizes the drive and will let me enable/disable it, but cannot retrieve any volume information. So it appears to be something in how the drive talks to W7.
is it possible that the drive’s file structure was corrupted? does the drive show up in disk management? otherwise, it may simply be that the drive has failed.
I finally went to a local computer shop and bought a cheap computer with no drives. I then installed both my old drives in that computer, connected to my local network, set up sharing on the offending drive, and retrieved all my files, which was the original goal.
There is something in this drive that makes it invisible to W7 when in an external enclosure. Whether it’s Windows or the drive is irrelevant, but it’s disappointing, since I’d like to be able to use it for backups, but that looks unlikely…
