Cant view laptop harddrive in External enclosure

Ok so this is gonna sound a little crazy. the other day my laptop would not load windows. Safe mode or regular. I tried just about everything. I was not wanting to do a rebuild yet on the drive since it has all of our pictures on it.
I went out and got an external enclosure for it and tried to hook it up to my Desktop (also running XP). Everytime I hook it up it freezes my Desktop up. I have tried to View it under my computer and also tried the right click "manage" option under my computer. when I look at the list of devices it tells me that the drive is working fine. But the Location is set at "0".

When I click on the manage drive option my computer more or less freezes and I am not able to see what letter it is being assigned to the external harddrive. I am only wanting to get to my pictures since we have hundreds of them saved to this drive. Once I have them I want to Xfer them to my desktop and then reformat the Laptop drive to use as an external HD now and junk my laptop.

 

In the first instance, prior to removing the HD from the laptop was it correctly detected by the bios?

As regards XP not detecting your external USB (+freezing), in your shoes I would boot from a Linux Live cd (Puppy is good as it's only 100mb and runs in ram) and then try to connect the external usb to it.

If Puppy also has issues detecting the external then I think you will need to use a prog like BiNG or PM to check the state of the partition.

Good Luck

 

Thanks for the Help I was able to use Puppy and transfer the photos over to my desktop with out a problem. now I will be formatting the old drive to use as a backup for my desktop and I will be savng my Puppy disk for any future problems..
Thanks again :-D

 

Welcome. Also note that Puppy has GParted incorporated into it (search in one of the menus) which is a formating/partitioning tool and will probably be more efficient than XP.

Also via GParted you can also repair partitions.

Good Luck