WD800 Caviar IDE Hard Drive - trying to access the drive with a USB Hard Drive Adapter

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I have an old WD800 IDE (not SATA) internal hard drive that I removed from an old tower PC. I have the drive hooked up to an external adapter designed to allow me to access the hard drive via a USB cable. I have a Windows 10 pro and a Windows 7 pro box. Neither will see it, although when I plug them in, you can hear the tone indicating that something was plugged into the USB port.

Disk Management doesn’t see it.

“Devices and Printers” in Windows 10 sees it, but when I right click and hover over “Browse Files”, the drive shows as Drive E, but is grayed out.
Oh, and under “Devices and Printers”, when I right-click on it and choose Troubleshoot, it doesn’t help.

Microsoft’s UVCView utility sees the external drive under “RootHub” and then Port 18, but I don’t see any benefit of knowing that.

What else can I do to recover the files?
(My father’s family history is on there with over 30,000+ ancestor’s names. Would REALLY like to access it).

3

just to be sure - you have IDE/USB adapter
Q: do you have connected also 4-pin power supply into the HDD? Something like this one

4

Yes

5

so next step:

  • make sure, when the drive is powered up - you can hear it spinning, humming. Y/N?
    Note: it necessary to test in a silent environment and from the power up state immediately

when NO - you don’t have power in the 4-pin connector or enough power or drive is failed. Check it pls. by Voltmeter: Yellow +12V, Red +5V, Black is ground

when YES - you need to continue:

  • You’ll need to install a driver for this USB/IDE device (check the adapter vendor site)
  • check the HDD jumpers.You need to configure such HDD as “Cable Select” first, then try find another Master/Slave conf, when it doesn’t work. Detailed jumper setup here
  • in Win10 Disk management - menu - Action/Rescan
1 Like