Hard Drive data recovery after a fire

A few months ago my daughter had a house fire and lost most everything. She took her laptop and our grandson's laptop into a Tech but could not afford his prices to attempt a recovery on both of their laptops so brought them home for "Dad" to work his magic...lol. The Tech was very cool and removed the drives for her for free and told her that he felt the data "should" be recoverable in his humble opinion. I purchased a StarTech USB 2.0 to IDE or SATA Adapter Cable that will work with 2.5" or 3.5" or 5.25" drives. It hooks up with adapters to a USB port. Easy Peasy...lol...sure.
Both hard drives appear to be in good condition, both paper labels are in original condition. One is a WD Scorpio hard drive the other is a Hitachi drive both are SATA drives. One is running Win Vista and the other is running Win XP.
My computer is running Win Vista 32 bit with 1 Tb in RAID 1, 4 Gb ram Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.40 GHz.
I read the directions with the cable array and followed them closely. Powered down my puter then connected the cables and one hard drive then plugged into a USB port. When I power up my puter "see's" that something is plugged into the port and provides the "Safely disconnect" icon in the tool bar but when I go to My Computer and try and find the drive I cannot find anything. The result is the same for either the WD drive or the Hitachi drive. I cannot readily tell if the drives are turning until I power them down when they do sound like they are spinning down. The cable array came with a small disc marked Drivers and I have run that disc. Most of the files my puter says it does not require or cannot use such as drivers for Win 98. I did download one program called "BackUp Manager" but none of these made any difference. I am prepared to accept that the drives are damaged beyond use but thought I would run this past people with more knowledge just in case I am missing something easy or obvious. My daughter and grandson tell me the drives have mostly pictures, some work related stuff and some homework related stuff so not a big deal but they lost SO much in the fire I thought a small victory would be kind of cool for them.
Any and all help appreciated.
Thanks,
Dave.

 

I take it that there is no activity light provided on the case, is the Power light on? you say you can hear it spin down when shut off which sounds like you have connection going on. USB port working OK and icon appears when connected, Look in Disk Management to see if it is listed there Control Panel/Admin Tools/Computer management/Disk Management if so what does it say. Failing that depending on mobo and how it runs go into BIOS and drop the voltage down to 1v on all USB ports, I had an ABIT a while ago and this was the only way I could access exterior USB HD.

 

I guess you also need to check that the laptop hard drives are set to slave on the jumpers.
What about getting an adapter that lets you connect the laptop hard drive to the PC IDE cable, and set it as a slave (assuming you have a PC - if not, you might be able to borrow one)?

 

Thanks for the help Toke. I am still not 100% sure what happened but I disconnected all the cables then carefully reconnected them. Powered down my puter and attched to the USB port. Turned the USB port attached hard drive on then powered up my puter. Same result as before. I went to Disk Management as you suggested and the extra drive was showing there but showed as "un-initialized". I wanted to see that same page without anything hooked up before I started changing anything so powered down the USB connected hard drive. My thinking then was to power back up from scratch then try and initialize the USB connected drive. When I powered back up my puter automatically went on line and found the necessary driver then initialized the USB connected drive. HUH? All was good, I can recover all the data from the Hitachi hard drive. Did a little victory dance. Powered all down then changed to the WD drive hooked up to the USB port. My puter showed the drive no problem but showed it as empty and needing to be Formatted before I could access it. Funny thing was it showed it as an empty 160Gb drive when it is a 250Gb hard drive. My thinking went to not having the correct driver for the WD drive so checked it out. Sure enough my puter was trying to use the Hitachi driver to read the WD drive. I powered everything down and disconnected the USB cable then powered back up empty. Went to WD's website to check for a driver with no success. Did some on line research with nothing definitive. Powered down again, carefully hooked up the cables again, re-connected to the USB port, powered up the USB connected drive then powered up my puter. Shazzam! Puter went on line, found the necessary driver then initialized the WD drive while I sat there and watched. All the data was there and accessible. Did another victory dance!
Not really sure what happened here, what I did or did NOT do but I am very happy that I managed (WITH the help of the good folks at Major Geeks) to pull these out of the fire...pun intended. The StarTech cable array and Adapter worked perfectly, dead simple to use and I did find they do have activity lights and power lights once the Dummy Operator flips the thing right side up. :-o
Thanks again for the help. I know my grandson is excited about getting back the contents of his laptop hard drive.
Dave.

 

Was the Hitachi a 160? I wonder if the machine thinks it still is hooking up to the Hitachi, stranger things have happened. Try re booting without the drive connected then power down and hook it up see if that does it!

Phil

 

Glad to hear its resolved and good to see an in depth reply on how you resolved it for others coming after you with a similar problem.

 

RED FACE! Pays to read the entire post!

 

I am really not sure why my puter would hang there and not do anything with the laptop hard drive connected through the USB port by the Adapter cables?? After thinking carefully about what I did and did not do I think it has something to do with the SEQUENCE I used to power up my puter and the USB connected hard drive. The StarTech instructions do instruct to power down the main computer before hooking up the USB cable Adapter to the target hard drive but are a little vague about start up sequence. I THINK, and I stress the THINK part, that after making sure all cable connections are correct. THEN power up the USB connected hard drive FIRST. Give it a few seconds(20-30) run time before powering up the main computer. If I remember correctly it was after using that sequence that my puter went ahead and loaded the necessary driver and initialized the USB connected hard drive all by itself. My puter's attempt to use the Hitachi driver to try and run the WD hard drive I hooked up second is a logical(imho) step for the puter in that I used the same cables hooked up to the same USB port without a shutdown or restart with nothing hooked up. Once I powered down and disconnected - re-connected the cable to the USB port it would then "see" the new USB connected hard drive as a NEW component and do another search and download of the WD driver then initialized the drive on it's own. Everything worked out great in the end thanks to everyone's input.
On a side note I put in a help request at StarTech's support site and never did get a reply although, to be fair, it IS the Christmas season and I am sure their Techs have a bit more on their minds during their Xmas break than some doofus in Candahoovia that can't use a cable array. :-D
As always Major Geeks came through and helped me out! :major

Major Geeks - Because sometimes it IS rocket science!

If anyone has similar problems in the future feel free to contact me and I will gladly stumble down the path with you groping blindly in the dark for a solution to an impossible problem. :-D
Regards,
Dave.

 

I have a myriad of input stuff, thumbs, zip, floppy, and still have an old Bernoulli kicking around. It seems that the system remembers what it read from last, I have had to reboot due to that a lot of times over the years.

Phil