Laptop wont read HDD Caddy

NoQuarter

Hi guys,

My old laptop died a few weeks ago, almost sure it was the processor giving up and the hard disk is fine, it should be. So got a new laptop (with win 8) and got a HDD caddy today to try hook up the old hdd to recover my files.

When I plug it into the USB ports, the light comes on and the disk spins, I can hear and feel it. So I wait for something to pop up as it would if I plugged in an external HD but nothing happens at all. The light just stays on and the disk keeps spinning.

No recognition of any drive in "my computer" nor anything out of place in device manager.

Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks.

degsie

I assume you are using a usb hdd caddy? Perhaps the drive is not getting enough power from the usb port, you might need a 'y' cable to get more juice. Also re-check your connections. Is the drive showing up on bios? Also check there are no other devices connected to usb as there may be a drive letter conflict going on.

NoQuarter

degsie wrote: »

I assume you are using a usb hdd caddy? Perhaps the drive is not getting enough power from the usb port, you might need a 'y' cable to get more juice. Also re-check your connections. Is the drive showing up on bios? Also check there are no other devices connected to usb as there may be a drive letter conflict going on.

Hi Degsie,

I just bought the USB caddy today, it has a Y cable and both are plugged in, as soon as I plug it in the disk lights up and starts spinning so it would be hard to believe it doesnt have enough power.

Ive checked in disk manager and there are no signs of it. I have also taken out all other USB connections and still no luck!

degsie

Does it show up on Device Manager?

Mr.Torrent

If its a new drive and yet not formatted, format the drive by going to Right click my computer icon on your desktop then Manage from the list choose Disk Management, see if its there, and also try to change its letter to something which is not used before.

also make sure you can see the drive information in bios.

NoQuarter

Its an old drive from my old laptop that died. The laptop Im on now is brand new, windows 8.

There is no sign of the disk in device manager or disk manager.

Its sitting here attached to the laptop, light on, spinning, but windows just cant see it!

johndoe99

a caddy usually uses generic Mass Storage drivers. Did yours come with a driver CD? Does the box state its supported under Windows 8?

What's the Make, Do they have a website?

NoQuarter

johndoe99 wrote: »

a caddy usually uses generic Mass Storage drivers. Did yours come with a driver CD? Does the box state its supported under Windows 8?

What's the Make, Do they have a website?

The box states that its driverless, so its just plug and play. That said, it doesnt say windows 8 on it, stops at windows 7, but ive also tried on my desktop which is XP and its not reading the HD there either!

johndoe99

Since laptop and Desktop won't access it, its either the HD that has failed, or the caddy's circuit board is faulty. If you have another HD to attach to the caddy, you could rule out one of them.

Irish Steve

Wish people would stay out if they don't KNOW what they are talking about, as some of the comments here are either dangerous, or could end up deleting the user's data.

The old drive would have been known as drive C on the old computer, and the New computer already has a drive C, so it's trying, and failing to recognise 2 drive C's

In device manager, it is possible to allocate a specific letter to the drive, and once that's been done, the operating system will be capable of resolving the conflict that it was not able to resolve, and the external drive should show up in the computer exactly as it's supposed to.

NoQuarter

Irish Steve wrote: »

In device manager, it is possible to allocate a specific letter to the drive, and once that's been done, the operating system will be capable of resolving the conflict that it was not able to resolve, and the external drive should show up in the computer exactly as it's supposed to.

Thanks Steve, but as I said, it wont show up in device manager at all, so I cant even see a random drive there that I can allocate a new letter to!

degsie

there is a free utility to check for attached usb devices called 'usbdeview', you could try that and see if anything gets recognised.

degsie

Irish Steve wrote: »

Wish people would stay out if they don't KNOW what they are talking about, as some of the comments here are either dangerous, or could end up deleting the user's data.

Please explain.

sawdoubters

download software to search for harddrive

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Irish Steve wrote: »

Wish people would stay out if they don't KNOW what they are talking about, as some of the comments here are either dangerous, or could end up deleting the user's data.

The old drive would have been known as drive C on the old computer, and the New computer already has a drive C, so it's trying, and failing to recognise 2 drive C's

Excuse me but this is completely wrong and you have contradicted yourself in successive sentences.

The fact that the default Windows drive letter is C has nothing to do with clashing drive letters (which can't happen) or the reason the caddy isn't being detected by the users computer at all. If the caddy was working, the old hard drive will show up as the next available drive letter within Windows 8 (If the System partition was C, recovery as D and DVD as E then the caddy would be F) the exact same way a generic USB hard drive would be detected. Partition letters are NOT assigned and set to hard drives, they are set only by an active OS. Please get your facts straight before throwing accusations of dangerous comments when people are trying to help.

OP, you need to test either a new caddy or different hard drive to cancel out which is at fault (if caddy works with another HDD, its the drive that is faulty. If HDD works in new caddy, its the caddy itself).

Normally I would side with a caddy fault since I've bought a few duds myself from the likes of eBay but since the laptop failed to boot - I'm guessing its the fault (esp. if its quite old).

Irish Steve

Or the new caddy is a USB 3 device, on a USB 2 computer.

I've had plenty of cases where a disc has not loaded because it was a C drive in the old computer, and the new computer is seeing the new drive as C also. Normally, the caddy will show up, but not open the drive. Windows is supposed to allocate an alternate letter, but I've seen (and sorted) plenty of cases where it did not.

The dangerous comments are things like right click to format the drive. Not exactly what the user is trying to achieve I think!

If the new caddy is not showing up at all, then it's either faulty, or as suggested already, USB 3 in a 2 device.

degsie

Irish Steve wrote: »

Or the new caddy is a USB 3 device, on a USB 2 computer.

I'm sorry but.....



Read up on USB backward compatibility.

wil

a few things to check.
First you seem fairly sure the drive is ok, but perhaps it is not and your initial assumption is wrong. You need to rule that out.
Many drives will spin up but if the mbr /boot sector etc is corrupted you may get nothing more than spinning - listen for any tell tale clicks, whines or unusual sounds.
When you plug in the usb, do you get any response from the pc - does it attempt to recognise it.
You will often get a failed unknown usb device as a partial response to troublesome caddy.
Is the drive ide or sata. - is it connected properly? laptop ide is not always keyed so incorrect connection is possible.
Power could still be an issue, a cheap caddy or a dodgy cable might not be getting sufficient power to boot up, but will spin.
I suspect if you are getting no response on both laptop and pc it is likely dodgy caddy/cable or power issue
if you get some response but no drive visible then caddy drivers (driverless might be a claim but not a guarantee) or the hd is dodgy.
If you are getting a partial response, you might look at getting a specific manufacturers drive test utility from their website, they all have their own and that can check for a variety of drive faults - care you dont do any kind of writing to the drive, except maybe a repair when everything else is ruled out.

Some caddys take forever to come up after plugging in, particularly with failing drives, give it a few minutes.

As for clashing drive letters, no, only ever seen anything like that as a result of an os fault causing a clash between a mapped drive and a usb - it doesn't like if you map drive e

Do a full power down on the laptop then test the caddy again, a fault may knock out the usb which usually requires cold boot to resolve.
Dodgy usb hd caddys have been known to burn out motherboards.

Skerries

I find that Linux is better for finding drives when attached by usb caddies, maybe download a bootable Ubuntu disk and see if it picks it up and it won't overwrite your current OS

Irish Steve

degsie wrote: »

I'm sorry but....

Read up on USB backward compatibility.

I did, in depth, a very long time ago.

Doesn't mean it will always work on every device, especially if it's an older machine that can't recognise the device ID code and load the correct drivers, or thinks it has the drivers loaded, but they are the wrong ones.

A webcam doesn't work very well when it loads a driver for a cordless mouse, and I've seen that happen several times due to wrong information coded into a ,INF file. Another was a USB to serial port converter that locked a machine completely when it loaded a scanner driver. There are others,

At the basic level, there are too many unknowns in this scenario. A new device, a potentially failed device from another machine.

There are more than a few ways that this could play out that were never intended by Microsoft, but the fact that they do just goes to prove that Microsoft can and do get it wrong on a regular basis.

degsie

This is going down a bit of a rabbit hole. The OP either has a faulty caddy or a faulty hdd. There are plenty of tips for the OP to work off, either way this type of scenario should remind everybody to back up your data.

degsie

Irish Steve wrote: »

device ID code

The correct terms are Product ID and Vendor ID.

Irish Steve

degsie wrote: »

This is going down a bit of a rabbit hole. The OP either has a faulty caddy or a faulty hdd. There are plenty of tips for the OP to work off, either way this type of scenario should remind everybody to back up your data.

The correct terms are Product ID and Vendor ID.

Pot, kettle, black.

OK, you know enough to be facetious. And, sometimes, wrong and offensive with it.

40 years of successfully repairing computers from the size of an Arduino up to mainframes means that there are times when the expected is not what happens, hence my comments earlier.

Just because Microsoft says it works doesn't mean it does, far from it.

RAID arrays are not supposed to fail. Ask Dav about that one.

I once spent 10 days of 18 hour days repairing a database because a programmer dealt with an end of medium flag on reel to reel mag tape without processing the 180K buffer of data that came from the device along with the flag setting, so there were 180K holes all over a 1Gb disc, back in the days when anything larger than 300 Mb was mainframe territory, and PC's still had 2 floppy discs for storage.

Computers are flawlessly logical in how they operate, when they are working correctly, programmers most definitely are not, and that can result in some very strange results.

I will let you deal with it, you clearly have plenty of time to nitpick

extra-ordinary_

degsie wrote: »

I'm sorry but.....



Read up on USB backward compatibility.

lol

In fairness Irish Steve, the OP had already stated that there was no disk in disk management.

Irish Steve

extra-ordinary_ wrote: »

lol

In fairness Irish Steve, the OP had already stated that there was no disk in disk management.

Not disagreeing there, but I have seen, several times, where a disc that has been locked to C and in a caddy has prevented the caddy from appearing in device manager, let alone disc manager.

In the absence of a source listing for the driver, working out why is not an option, but...... it happened, and may well happen again.

When you're up to your arse in alligators, it's sometimes hard to remember that the original plan was to drain the swamp, and some of the alligators that get certified by Microsoft have VERY sharp teeth.

degsie

Irish Steve wrote: »

Pot, kettle, black.

OK, you know enough to be facetious. And, sometimes, wrong and offensive with it.

I have obviously rubbed you up the wrong way, but comments like this are unhelpful.

I came on here to try and help the OP resolve a problem he/she was having. When I see comments which are technically dubious I am prepared to call that person on it.

I would never question anybody's ability to troubleshoot, especially those with vast experience such as you, BUT stating things as fact when they are clearly not deserves to be highlighted.

So, I'm sorry if I offended you. I'm sure we both hope that the OP has learned enough on here to help resolve the problem they are having.

Let's put the handbags away for now

Irish Steve

Yes, that's fine with me, I'm also working on the same idea, try and find the way to solve the OP's issue, and my original reason for coming in to the thread was because of some very dangerous comments about format, which was NOT what the OP was trying to do.

I may well not get the exact field name or location, that's the problem with trying to remember an issue on a version of operating system that I'm not necessarily running on the machine that's live right now. It's one of the problems of getting older, and not having hands on access to the specific issue that's causing the issue.

Hopefully the OP will come back to us with some more details of how it's going with recovering his data,

And yes, it does emphasise that backups of critical data are not an option, regardless of the size or age of the machine.