Stubborn Hard drive

I have an old hard drive from an old Gateway XP machine that the motherboard went bad in. I purchased a new computer to replace it (for my wife) and then I installed the old hard drive in a drive case and connected it to a USB port .

I had been using this external drive case on my computer and it works fine.
Anyway, the old hard drive is recognized and shown as working and healthy by Windows XP disk manager program that is accesed through control panel.

However, when I right click to explore it, I find that the "explore" option is greyed out. Also, when I open Explorer, it does not show up as an extra drive.
The HD should be fine, and I should be able to read and transfer the files off of it, but I can't get it to show up in Explorer. Is there some known reason for this ??? Is there some software that I can buy that will give me access to it.?

If I put a "non - system" hard disk in the external drive case, the computer sees it just fine. It has to do with the fact that WinXP is on the disk, I think.

Also, it was one of those "partitioned drives" that had the Gateway back-up stuff on the D-drive partition". Does anyone have any clues ??? Help help....my wife wants her photos and old email. :cry

 

In the first instance I would be tempted to remove the partition's active status.

By that I mean the following. For a hard drive to be bootable it needs to be made active. Obviously, this flag has remained and perhaps this is causing some form of issue.

Failing that the alternative and perhaps the one that I would follow, is to use Puppy Linux. Puppy will boot from a live cd and loads in ram. Once you boot to the desktop, Puppy will detect hdd or usb devices connected and these will be displayed as icons on the desktop. It will then be possible to copy the data from the usb hard disc onto another usb device.

If you are going to go down the Puppy Linux route [it is easy] then you can also use GParted the build in partition prog and this will allow you to easily remove the active flag from the XP partition.

Good Luck

 

Thanks for the reply. I am gonna try the Western Digital disk utilities program to see what I can do with that, and maybe Partition Magic and what ever else I can find that might give me some help....and then if none of that works I will try the Linux route. I do appreciate all suggestions and will try all "non destructive" ideas first...then the more risky ones as a last resort.

dm:wave

 

Partition Magic will not allow you to remove the active flag if the hard drive has only one primary partition. BiNG will.

The Puppy Linux route is not risky at all, certainly a lot less risky than using a prog like Partition Magic.

Good Luck

 

Because you were kind enough to reply, I thought I would reply to your post and tell you that I resolved the problem, in a way.

I still do not totally understand why windows explorer would not read the drive, but I found a program on ZDnet download site that fixed me up. It is called "File Scavanger".

Kinda expensive($50) , but it read all files on the disk and allowed me to select which ones that I wanted to copy to my current hard drive.

Because I am short on time every day, and my wife wanted the photos, I just bought the program and made it a done deal.

Thanks for your effort and time.

Dave