I have a Western Digital USB hard drive, which had served me well for 2+ years. Recently, when I returned from a short trip out of town, I found that my PC was not recognizing the hard drive and the hard drive kept making a strange loud clicking sound, like the head was somehow attempting to read the hard drive but failing. After several attempts, I decided to try some alternative approaches to fixing the problem. First, I tried connecting it to my Linux box, but I didn't know how to access the device (/dev/usb??). Next, I took the bold step of opening up the enclosure and found a plain ol' IDE hard drive inside. I stripped the hard drive out of the enclosure. For this, I had to loosen some screws and detach the drive from a circuit board. I'm guessing that the circuit board provided the necessary power to the drive and also acted as a convertor from USB to IDE. Then, I tried connecting the IDE drive to my Linux machine and found, to my surprise, that Linux recognized the drive without any configuration. I was able to mount it and access the data on it without any problems. Next, I disconnected it from the Linux PC and connected it back to my Windows PC (running Windows 2000). In both cases, I connected the drive to the secondary IDE controller with a master/only drive setting on the hard drive. But, although my Windows PC recognizes the drive and assigns a drive letter to it, it thinks that the drive is unformatted and prompts me to format it whenever I access the drive. Why is this happening? What would be the best way to recover the data on the disk?
Thanks in advance,
Swaroop
Thanks in advance,
Swaroop