Will this hard driver reader work with my hard drive?

http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_...ssories&psid=FROOGLE01&sid=IDx20070921x00003a


My Hard drive is a SATA pulled from a Dell XPS 200. Samsung Model # HD160JJ/P


Will I be able to get "My documents" back? will it let me read the files from it or will it make me format the drive?

 

I think what you are saying is this is a spare drive pulled from a previous machine. If that is the case most any hard drive enclosure should be fine, the link you posted looks like it should do the job.

Phil

 

What if it was not a spare drive? But the primary hard drive? My computer crashed and I bought a new PSU which eventually helped, but the problem was really with the motherboard because the power light was solid amber. I decided not to put anymore money. I was backing up my files to a seperate partition on the drive. This drive has windows 7 installed on it and it's not simply just for storage. And I need to know if that will matter.

 

I don't think that matters as long as the HD is fine.

 

I will buy it and let you know how it works out.

 

That will work fine, but if you are in the "repair" business, personally I prefer the next item (the cables with the IDE-SATA adaptor) that works perfectely, I love it!!! That comes with the power adaptor and all the cables to plug it into USB and you can plug virtually any desktop-Laptop HDD, DVD-CD ROM, etc.

 

Well, I bought the Masscool Sata reader from Newegg and i put my HD in it and connected it by USB cable, and installed the software but my computer detects several drives but treats them like they are empty. The one drive shows up with the PC Clone Ex software.

Will this device only transfer data to an external hard drive or should my Windows 7 read it like mass storage device.

My Device

 

What you have there is a standard docking station that windows should see as another hard drive when the drive is connected. If the drives are appearing as empty, then it might mean that the drives have become corrupted or otherwise damaged, although at this stage I am not saying that is likely.

 

The drive seems to be there, but I can't create a partition if I wanted too. I tried the hardware on another laptop but had no luck.. When I look at the drivers, there are hole bunch listed for the different types of memory cards the device takes, and one of the drivers is also "disk drive".

 

Yes, that is how windows shows the different card readers, you have to find out which letter correspond to your drive.

 

It's the (I) drive. I'm thinking that maybe the hard drive might not work with the device or the windows driver won't work. I basically had the same issue with XP as with Win. 7

 

Neither of these is very likely, the drive one being almost impossible as if your drive physically fits on the connector, it must be of the correct standard to work. The driver one is also not likely as other people who buy this product get it working using the drivers.

I would therefore assume from this that the hard drive has become corrupted, and it is likely that without the intervention of a data retrieval company your data is probably, and I stress probably, lost.

However, I am sure more members here have some good ideas to help attempt recovery.

 

I don't think it's corrupted, not when I used it last ot boot up my old computer. There was a guy in town that wanted to charge me $75 to recover my data, he came down from $150. But I don't if it's worth that much. I did backup my data periodically to DVD, I may just fall back on that. I think my old Dell XPS 200 motherboard went bad.

 

If the drive will not register as having any partitions or data on 2 computers then it is likely that it is corrupted.

What does disk management say about the drive? To access disk management, right-click on "My computer" and choose "manage". Then in the tree on the left hand side, choose "disk management". Then scroll through the list until you find the external drive. Please post a screenshot of it's state.

 

Actually, here is the reader I bought.

http://www.masscool.com/product_detail.php?tab=2&pid=156&id=119#p

It seems to only support older hard drives?

 

It may only support SATA 1.5Gb/s, but all SATA 3Gb/s drives are backwards compatible.

 

yeah, Don't I have to jump the pins? i don't hve the plastic piece though.

 

Nope, SATA drives are automatically backwards compatible.

 

Ok, I just figured something out. When I remove the hard drive. All the other emtpy drives disappear.

 

Here's a screen shot and the drivers that are installed. I plug in the hard drive and get drivers for SD Card and CF cards etc.

 

Now this is making sense. The computer is seeing the docking station as a card reader station only. I suggest you uninstall all the drivers and just reinstall the driver for the hard drive part.

 

But how do I do that? The driver I downloaded was specific for trhe hard drive but is not compatible with Windows 7 64 bit. Also, I don't where to find the genernic hard drive driver on Windows 7

 

It's not the generic driver you need. Did the driver package for the reader come on a CD or did you download it from their website?

 

It came with a CD, I installed the CD. but the software is called "PC Clone Ex" and it did not help.

 

What you need to do is to have a look around on the CD for a folder called "Drivers" or similar and see if you can find any .inf files in there. Or, alternatively, just search the CD for *.inf

 

I did that but there is no file just an exe program.

 

Then you need to copy the EXE to your hard drive and extract it using 7-zip: http://www.7-zip.org/