Hard Drive Recovery Help

My laptop isn't sensing my hard drive, and I've removed it and tried to set it up as an external drive on my desktop. The desktop does show that I've plugged in a drive but shows no volume and won't scan or read the drive. I've tried multiple hard drive utilities to try and salvage my files of the drive but get the same problem. Any way to try and get my files off the drive at home or will this require someone with more experience and equipment? Thanks for any help. Aj

 

Is this an extra hard drive? How are you seeing the desktop? Does this hd have xp installed? ed

 

it's the main and only hard drive for my laptop and has XP installed on it- have unable to use the repair option as my laptop doesn't recognize it. I removed it and then plugged it in via a usb device into my desktop with add it as a drive under My Computer but lists it as empty with a volume of zero. The drive is up an spinning when I listen to it in the case.

 

Go into bios [setup] and select set defaults [ usually an f key maybe f9. Try again. ed

 

tried it; when I boot up, still get "no operating system found" ,and if I boot with the XP disk get "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer".

 

I would suggest getting one of these, and hooking up the hd to a desktop and find out if it will locate it, and pull your files off from there. ed

http://www.cablestogo.com/product.asp?cat_id=906&sku=17705

 

Try connecting the drive as a slave to another healthy system. If the drive is detected and easily accessible then no issues. If, the drive is detected and you are not able to access the data. Try some Data Recovery Software. I suggest you to first try the demo version to see whether the software is able to recover your files or not, if you can see the files then, you can go for it

Hope this helps you.

 

If it is in your desktop, make sure jumper is set to slave. Now to set your desktop to see it...right click on My Computer, click Manage, d/click on Disk Management.
Now, Disk 0 should be C:, you should see Disk 1, which should be the slave HDD, right click and import foreign drive or something like that.....assign a drive letter if necessary.