Hard drive not accesible

[areid]

Issue # 1, I travel fulltime and had issues with my laptop hard drive not booting up, so I bought a new one and exchanged them out because I could not be shut down while at a clients site. now months later I bought a hard drive case and put the old hard drive in it and connected via usb to try and recover data from the drive. now I can see it in disk management but not with a drive letter, if I right click to try to assign a letter to the drive it is grayed out. the drive shoes as healthy and active, I also made sure I was logged in as adminstrator and have all administrator rights, any thoughts? thanks for any input.

Issue # 2, I have a lacie 500 gb external hard drive that the light comes on but it is dim, it does not show up no where on my machine, not even in device manager. I have tried to find a new power supply with no luck to try that, any other thoughts? thanks for your inputs.

[chiefrv]

Regarding issue 1
Did you try starting the computer with the new drive already connected in the external manner?
and vice versa start the computer first then add the new (old) drive?

Chief

[areid]

Thanks for the info, I have tried it both ways and neither one works. any other suggestions? thanks

[Chaky]

Issue #1
- The laptop is the same one that didn't boot with the drive in question? If so, the hard drive is either dead or it needs formatting (corrupt MBR). In any case, the data is as good as lost.

- There is a slight chance of data retreval by fixboot and/or fixmbr command via recovery console on XP setup CD.

- You could try plugging it in different machine.

- (this only applies if the drive is not dead) To make drive usable, delete the partitions and/or logical drives and create new ones. Once you do, you can format them. Be warned: that will wipe all data from that drive.

Issue #2
- Try plugging that drive into different machine. It is possible that there are lack of appropriate drivers or ther is USB controller incompatibility with the drive in question.

[areid]

Thanks Chaky, I appreciate the information, I have tried it with several other computers and the same thing, so I guess it is dead. not what I wanted to hear but I agree with your statement and just checking to see if anyone might know a way around anything. I will try formatting it after I try data recovery once more. Thanks again for the input. much appreciated.

Issue #1
- The laptop is the same one that didn't boot with the drive in question? If so, the hard drive is either dead or it needs formatting (corrupt MBR). In any case, the data is as good as lost.

- There is a slight chance of data retreval by fixboot and/or fixmbr command via recovery console on XP setup CD.

- You could try plugging it in different machine.

- (this only applies if the drive is not dead) To make drive usable, delete the partitions and/or logical drives and create new ones. Once you do, you can format them. Be warned: that will wipe all data from that drive.

Issue #2
- Try plugging that drive into different machine. It is possible that there are lack of appropriate drivers or ther is USB controller incompatibility with the drive in question.

[Chaky]

I'm guessing that you're talking about external drive (issue #2). If it doesn't show in drive management, then there is no way to format it. At least not from within Windows.

This goes for both drives:
You might want to look for drive utilities and tools from drive's manufacturer. Especially if it comes in a form of bootable ISO image.

[areid]

Thank you, I definitely will not ever again buy a lacie external hard drive, they put all different kinds of drives inside and their customer support is awful, worst I have ever seen. Thanks again for your help and info, I guess data is lost, luckily most was backed up. Thanks again.