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General discussion

Problem with External Hard Drive Enclosure

Sep 21, 2006 1:53PM PDT

Okay. I'm trying to access my hard drive from another computer since it became unbootable after my computer told me that there was an incompatible program on its drive. I bought a laptop hard drive enclosure from Newegg.com. It's a Rosewill enclosure, very cheaply made. The manual was filled with grammatical errors and typos. I'm asuming that there were translation problems.

Anyway, it told me that I had to create a new partition in the hard drive and consequently reformat it. Unfortunately, I'm also trying to retrieve three-years-worth of work from the hard drive, and I would prefer not to erase the data to do that.

Is there any way I can get around this? My partner just bought an iMac, but I have a Windows based computer (Compaq Presario 2100 notebook pc). How can I create a partition without erasing the data?

Discussion is locked

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What's the drive capacity ? Some laptop enclosures
Sep 21, 2006 3:46PM PDT

don't see drives correctly or only see 60 or 80 or 100GBs. I bought a 100GB laptop HDD and had to do some searching to find an enclosure that would recognize the entire drive. I ended up getting an Adaptec enclosure ... all their enclosures support drives up to 1000GBs.

VAPCMD

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It's 30 GB
Sep 21, 2006 11:32PM PDT

It's small. Rosewill didn't specify anything...

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There may be issues with the drive. Here's what I do...
Sep 22, 2006 12:57AM PDT

I boot up a LiveCD of any number of Linux versions. While I prefer Knoppix, there is also PCLinuxOS and DSL that are worth trying to see if they see the files.

Since you are in some file/drive recovery mode you have to reveal the details. For instance one person was trying to recover files from a NTFS formatted drive on a Windows 98se machine. Oops.

In closing see if a demo of ZERO ASSUMPTION RECOVERY sees the files from http://www.z-a-recovery.com/ sees it. At that point this becomes an economic decision. Are my files worth this much?

Bob

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Install
Sep 23, 2006 6:37AM PDT

If your friend is willing and has a pc have him install the drive in an extra slot of the PC[for stability reasons] connect the middle connector to main drive and first connector to your drive. Do not have slave or master selected on your drive. Leave empty.Connect Power: When you start your friends pc the drive should be showing itself. From there you can grab what you want off of it. There are many self help quides on the net to explain this in detail or diagrams if you want.
IF you do not see it and have trouble's there is a program from http://www.grc.com/intro.htm called Spin Rite by Steve GIbson that recovers Hard drives. Just for your info. May come in handy and is not expensive.

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Cheaper way if you have a friend
Sep 22, 2006 2:31AM PDT

You could always hook the drive up as a slave inside another machine and just pull the files off that way. You could possibly forget the whole external hard drive enclosure. If it is a laptop hard drive you might need an adapter but it should be easy to do.

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(NT) (NT) How do I do that?
Sep 22, 2006 7:18AM PDT
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Here's how
Sep 25, 2006 12:03AM PDT

If you have a 2.5 notebook drive, you may need an adapter to fit the 3.5 standard drive cable. But you would hook the drive you want the information off of as the slave (change jumper to slave) on the second channel of you IDE Cable. Make sure that the primary hard drive on this machine has its jumper set to be master and not Cable Select as sometimes the case. Once the hard drives are connected to the IDE Channel and both have power and jumpered correctly, you should be able to see it once you boot up and then just Drag and drop.

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Alright, will do...
Sep 27, 2006 6:57AM PDT

...with my partner's old Dell computer this weekend at his parents' house.

Tell me, though, what is drag and drop?

Thanks.

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Didn't work yet...
Oct 15, 2006 9:56AM PDT

I tried the above solution, didn't work, but I don't think I did it correctly.

There were three slots; one was empty and had no ribbon. The second one was connected to the CD Drive and it had a slave port. The third one was connected to the primary hard drive but had no slave port. I connected my laptop hard drive through an adapter to the secondary hook-up of the second ribbon (didn't work), then disconnected the CD drive and connected the end of the ribbon to my laptop hard drive, still didn't work. The screen would blip on and there would be a loud beep from the machine and it would say that the hard drive couldn't be detected.

I'm thinking that the ribbon connected to the primary hard drive needed a slave port.

Can anyone correct me if I'm wrong?