the adapter arrived yesterday. i removed the hard drive and attached the adapter, unfortunatly i'm not seeing the data. when i plug in my backup drive at the same location it will show up right under my internal hard drive on the "computer" page. the laptop drive spins, beeps, and is searching (rather noisily), and the adapter power and access lights are lit. the "safely remove hardware" icon pops up (and in details shows a "usb mass storge device at port_#0001.hub_#0003"), but i can't find access to it.
any thoughts?
This is part of what I do for a living. How bad do you want this data?
BIOS detects the drive, when it's installed in a computer? You put your ear next to the drive, and you can hear it humming (as opposed to clicking, clunking or a deathly silence)?
If "no" to either of those, stop now. The drive's toast, and your only hope is a data recovery $ervice like Ontrack or one of its competitors.
If yes then...
First) a hardware diagnostic like Seagate's Seatools to see just how fried this drive is. Google it for the download link. Seatools has a Windows version (hook the drive up as a second drive in a system to check it), and a standalone dos version. (The DOS version does not always detect a drive present. I think it has to do with the controller. If not, try it connected to a different system. The Windows version I have never had this problem with.)
If the drive fails monumentally, with zillions of bad sectors, hang it up. It's probably hopeless.
If the drive passes, or fails with a few bad sectors, then...
Second) attempt to clone the drive, sector by sector, to a new good disk. There're several tools, all Linux based, that I have used in the past that handle cloning bad sectors gracefully. Rdd I have most experience with. Gnu ddrescue I have used some. If you use these, make sure you understand the command line options, and make sure you know which device is source and which is destination. Clonezilla has a "rescue mode" that I haven't had that much luck with. It wouldn't be my first choice.
Once you have the data to a known good disk, see if you can see partitions on it. See in you can mount them. Try to chkdsk the file system.
If you can't see a partition, you may need to run something like
testdisk to find partitions. Check the link for a howto on repairing partition tables with what testdisk tells you.
Failing that, scan with
photorec to look for recoverable files.
