How to convert external/USB hard drive to internal/IDE

[rkrpxz]

Hi:

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

 

[wahnula]

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

That should be your clue. If the drive is not functioning correctly either:

A) STOP USING IT IMMEDIATELY and cradle it off to a drive recovery service. I am sure someone here can recommend a good, reasonable one.

B) Attempt recovery with a program like Zero Assumption

http://www.z-a-recovery.com/

and see if it can see anything on the drive.

Personally if I had a drive with a loud clicking sound not being recognized and it had valuable, irreplaceable data on it I would choose A. A Linux guru can possibly offer other options, but if the drive was spastically clicking (for how long?) I would not hold out much hope, as the mechanical parts of the drive may be fried. The good news is check the serial number online you may get a new one free.

Best of luck.

Tony

 

[mainegeek]

rkrpxz,
This works well..

http://www.runtime.org/

 

[Freestone]

Just be aware that this is cross-posted in thread751-1241126

 

[rkrpxz]

All:

Thanks for the very useful response. I apologize for cross-posting. This is my first time in this forum, and I was uncertain about the etiquette.

I will try out the options suggested by all of you.

Thanks again,
Swaroop