Hi,

My old pc died of motherboard failure, and i decided to purchase a new one. I bought a USB hard-drive adaptor from Amazon (USB 2.0 to IDE SATA Adaptor Cable with Power Adaptor: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics & Photo) and connected it up appropriately.

At first the device was not recognised, so i moved the jumper to master. Finally, On Windows 7 64bit the contents were recognised , however explorer did not respond. Upon restart, i got the message saying you need to format the drive before you can use it. I disconnected/retried and the hard drive does not power/spin at all now.

I read online on another forum that i should attempt to connect to another system, and so i used my friends' WinXP system. Again, the same problem occured, no power or spinning.

The hard-drive in question, is a Maxtor 3.5 Series Diamond Plus 9 (120GB ATA/133)

Could the problem be the placement of the jumper shunts? I have a few spare, and am not really sure where to place them. Do i need one or two?

It sounds like that drive died. You don't need more than one to select Master, Slave, or CS. Use this to make sure yours is right: http://eshop.macsales.com/Tech/manua...s/Maxtor72.pdf

There are two jumper shunts connected, from left to right, there one in slots 1 and 3.

If i were to open the hard-drive, what should i look out for?

If i were to open the hard-drive, what should i look out for?

Nothing. There are no user serviceable parts inside HD. If you open it up, you will contaminate the environment. All the electronics are on the board that you see on the bottom of the drive. If you see nothing physically damaged or burnt, there's nothing you can do there either.

If there is data on that drive that is critical, you can take the drive to a data recovery service center where they have the very expensive and specialized equipment, and special training necessary to do the forensic analysis (yes, CSI stuff) to retrieve the data. This service is very expensive, but may be worth it, depending on how important the data is.

Sorry, not what you want to hear, I am sure. Nor is a reminder to have a good backup policy, but that's why they are so important too.

No problem, thanks for the help.

I already have a buffalo drivestation which has 500Gb. I normally back my data up once a month, just that my old computer died in september, and i forgot to back-up a few unimportant files and documents.

You mentioned a "good backup policy" should i invest in an additional external hard-disk? (the 500Gb one is almost full!)

Well, if there's not enough room in your present backup location, you either need to make room, or get more room.

If you could connect the hard drive to an internal connector on your machine then you might find you can format it and use it again externally. Sometimes an external drive can get corrupted and made unuseable via a usb connection after disconection. The only wayback is to do as I suggested and reformat the hard drive, it should then work by connecting to a usb port agagin.