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I have a stack of internal hard drives that I want to pull data off so I bought the USB 2.0 to Sata/IDE cable and power supply kit.
Everything works great with my two smaller WD drives at 40 & 80gig.
My Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 160g drive seems to take forever to access it from my windows 7 laptop usb port....actually you can never access it but it shows a progress bar in "my computer" when you open it to see what is happening. The drive is working and seems to have no issues.
According to the directions of the kit you need to set the drive to Master, plug in the ide cable to the drive, plug in the power then plug in the usb cable to the pc.
Any ideas on how to access this data with the cables I have? What am I doing wrong?
Thanks
I've attached two images of the hard drive. I'm putting the jumper on the two pins furthest from the power jack.

Your pictures aren't coming up.

Sounds like you've already got the jumper on the correct (Master) pins. But something you could try is moving the jumper to the next set of pins over (2nd farthest from the power connector), which is the "Cable Select" setting.

If the drive still works when connected to another PC, perhaps you could copy the files to your laptop using an Ethernet cable instead?

Hi!
Can you try to set the drive to Cable Select? That works sometimes.

Heehee! beat me to it!

I will try those ideas. Do these pics show up?
bitcat, atleast when he beat you to the reply he didn't say "First"
http://www.flickr.com/photos/76051501@N07/6830652305/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/76051501@N07/6830652637/

I've seen that happen, if you plug the connections in, in the wrong order, with power still applied it can fry the controller chip. It's been my experience that those USB<-->IDE interface ICs do not like to be hotplugged. It may report to Windows that there is a drive; but, not function.

Try going back to one of the other drives that worked in order to confirm the USB interface is still good. Then throw the IDE drive into a PC to see if it still works. My money is on the IDE drive being OK but the USB<-->IDE interface chip being not so OK.

I dont have a desktop pc to throw it in anymore.
Here is a screen shot of what it is doing.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/76051501@N07/6830977679/
Every time I open "My Computer" the little green bar starts moving from left to right showing the access of the drive.
It keeps moving until the end and it gets real slow. I've left it there for an hour and still no access to the drive.

I followed the orders of the instructions that came with the kit.
Are you saying usb ports dont like to be hot plugged? Ever usb device with power is hot plugged so I'm a little confused on that.

I think he's saying that the adapter doesn't like being hot-plugged into the drive. It didn't sound like you did that to me...

The 40gig WD drive is working fine. Copying files now.

geekgirrl wrote:

Are you saying usb ports dont like to be hot plugged? Ever usb device with power is hot plugged so I'm a little confused on that.

No, I was referring to the 40 pin IDE connector. In fact, the USB should be the last connection made and the first broken, which it sounds like you're doing.

geekgirrl wrote:

I followed the orders of the instructions that came with the kit.

Then you should be (should have been) fine.

geekgirrl wrote:

The 40gig WD drive is working fine. Copying files now.

If you're using the same interface and the 40GB works but the other drive does not, it doesn't like the 160GB drive is any good. I'd still try putting it into another PC and testing it there.

geekgirrl wrote:

The drive is working and seems to have no issues.

How have you tested it to know it's fine?

This was the main drive in my desktop pc and was not booting up. Everything powered up including the hard drive but the OS on the drive was so messed up that windows wouldnt boot up properly. When this happens I usually reformat or just make it a slave drive, pull off my data, then reformat. I'm having an issue accessing the drive and dont know if it's the drive, the OS on the drive, the jumper setting or the way I'm hooking it up.

My thoughts now is to try hooking it to another laptop and to try every jumper setting. If this doesnt work I will have to try best buy or a non-chain pc store and see if they can even access the drive. BB will most likely charge me a million dollars for this so I may avoid them.

Better ideas?

You could try booting the desktop PC from a Linux live CD and see if that can access the hard drive.

It is really starting to sound like the drive is dead though.

I second using a Linux disc to try recovering the drive. It's less picky sometimes.

What does Disk Management say about the drive? Start > Right click Computer > Manage. Storage > Disk Management. If it shows the drive, but the volume is white. You're partition is having problems. If it shows the drive, but there is only a grey bar. You might have hardware problems.

I do not have a desktop pc.
Can I boot to a linux disc on a laptop?

So far Disk Managment is saying "Connecting to virtual disk service..."
I only plugged it in 30 seconds ago.

I can see the drive in my computer but I just still get the green bar at the top that slowly moves to the right like it is accessing the drive.
It will not show me the available drive space left on the drive or the overall space under properties.

I tried the disk on a vista laptop with the jumper set to Master and it said I need to format the disk before I use it.

geekgirrl wrote:

I do not have a desktop pc.

Oh... so you don't have access to the PC it was originally installed in?

geekgirrl wrote:

Can I boot to a linux disc on a laptop?

If the laptop supports booting from the CD, then probably. But my intent when I suggested that was to try and access the drive via a native IDE controller. For drives that are experiencing issues you've got a better chance of being able to read the drive without the IDE-USB bridge getting in the way. Connecting to a native IDE port will also allow you to run the drive manufacturer's diagnostics.

I have the pc it was installed in but it will not boot up in that pc as the pc has issues. Either the motherboard or the OS on the hard drive. This is the same drive I'm trying to access now.

I'm installing syslinux on a flashdrive now. I have done a little unix and dos but that was a long time ago so I'm a little intimidated by linux and not sure how easy it will be to access the drive and then get the data off the drive using linux. How hard is this to do for someone not experienced with linux?

geekgirrl wrote:

I have the pc it was installed in but it will not boot up in that pc as the pc has issues. Either the motherboard or the OS on the hard drive. This is the same drive I'm trying to access now.

If the problem is the OS, then you should still be able to re-install the drive in the desktop PC and boot from a CD. If it is the motherboard (or the drive itself), then yeah that's a problem...

geekgirrl wrote:

I'm installing syslinux on a flashdrive now. I have done a little unix and dos but that was a long time ago so I'm a little intimidated by linux and not sure how easy it will be to access the drive and then get the data off the drive using linux. How hard is this to do for someone not experienced with linux?

Provided you're using a distro that has NTFS support (not sure about syslinux), someone here should be able to walk you through it. (Assuming the drive is even accessible...)

I'm not real hopeful that it's gonna work on the laptop though, since Windows couldn't see the drive.

I just called best buy and it sounds like they will tell me if they can view that data there for free. They are going to throw it in an enclosure and see what happens.
Data recovery starts at $250 and goes up which is crazy. I can find a local fellow geek to get the data for a lot less I'm guessing.
I get the impression going the linux route will take me a lot more time so I'm going to try a few other things first.

My go-to Linux USB stick is a current version of Parted Magic. It can do NTFS and it's extremely portable in my experience. May be worth taking a look at the drive within that.

TheWacoKid wrote:

My go-to Linux USB stick is a current version of Parted Magic. It can do NTFS and it's extremely portable in my experience. May be worth taking a look at the drive within that.

What does all that stuff you just said mean? Is the program called Parted Magic? Do you just load it to a flash drive and boot to it? Is it easy to use?

http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=start

It's a bootable ISO that you can burn to a DVD, a USB drive, or whatever. I burned it to a USB drive with UltraISO. It might be able to access the drive where Windows is choking...but the drive does sound like it's on the way out so it may not help at all.

If you don't mind me asking, where are you? If you're in Ottawa, I could perhaps have a look at your drive.

I'm in Chicago. I'm going to run it to BB in a little bit and see if they can access it. Then, depending on what they say I will try something else.
One time someone told me to reload windows on the drive. It wipes out windows but doesnt erase your documents folders and all that stuff.
And truth to that?

It's true, but messy.

Let's just put that idea aside for the moment. The partition table is either corrupt, and Windows will want to format it during the install, or the drive is bad and it won't change anything.

Best Buy couldnt access the drive. The only used their windows geek squad program that just tells them they can access the drive. They could not say it was a hardware issue or a software issue.
So what is the easiest way to try and access this drive though linux and how do I set up a version of linux on a flash drive?
Would that be the best next step?

For bootable linux I've use knoppix and just ubuntu as a live CD (DVD?) that I downloaded an iso and burned to a disk. It was that simple. Both have included tools for browsing attached drives. If you're looking for a data/partition recovery solution that's a bit over my head but I'm sure you could find something.

Are you trying to recover the OS or is there data that only exists on that drive? If it's data you might be out of luck if the drive is dead, but at this point I would say buy a new drive to put windows back on and move forward.

Actually, it sounds like you might need a drive anyways, so installing windows on a machine with a native IDE controller might be your best bet recovering the data.

I'm just after the data. I dont care about any of the windows stuff.
I dont need a new drive in the old pc as it is dead. Motherboard is not repairable and I have a laptop now and am not going back to a desktop.

I've downloaded parted magic. Looks like a good program. My laptop is 64bit that I will be using to boot to the usb and access the drive. The hard drive is 32 or 16bit so do I need the 64bit version of parted magic? I would guess not as I will be booting to a 16/32bit version of parted magic and accessing a 16/32bit hard drive but I thought I would ask to be sure.
Thanks

TheWacoKid wrote:

http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=start

It's a bootable ISO that you can burn to a DVD, a USB drive, or whatever. I burned it to a USB drive with UltraISO. It might be able to access the drive where Windows is choking...but the drive does sound like it's on the way out so it may not help at all.

32-bit vs 64-bit isn't something you need to worry about in regards to the hard drive. 32-bit or 64-bit refers to the code the processor runs rather then the data on a hard drive, so either version will work with your processor.