I have an external hard drive caddy to recover data from a hard disk used as the C drive on a PC running windows XP the motherboard having failed. My new PC runs Windows 7. The drive was installed in the enclosure according to the caddy manual as ‘master’ and runs without a problem. When the USB connection was made the PC installed the drivers recognised the existence of the mass storage device but did not allocate a drive letter. In Disk Manager it can be seen as ‘disk6 unknown not initialised’. Right clicking the disc 6 entry and choosing initialise brings up the error ‘Device not ready’ I have tried running the disk as slave but with the same result.
The hard drive is a Hitachi Deskstar Model:HDS722516VLAT20 capacity 165GB 7200RPM PN;14R9247 MLC:BA1254 LBA:321.672.960 SECTORS CHS: 16383/16/63, an IDE device I believe. My new computer I think is SATA.
Other information
1. The hard disc spins.
2. The fan and LED lights on the caddy are working.
3. The capacity of the disk is 160GB.
4. There is no icon on the bottom right of the desktop.
5. In Disk Manager it is described as a Mass Storage Device and connected to the Universal Serial Bus controllers and is described as ‘disc6 not initialised 96GB unallocated.I’ve been struggling with this for a while and any ideas would be appreciated.
6.It is not possible to allocate a drive letter.
Thankyou for any help
See if Hitachi have diagnostic software to check the drive to make sure it’s ok after the mb failure.
Another thing you can try is connect it directly to your mobo if it has a ide connector.