Jephree or Any other brave soul
I hope you can give me some advise on this ongoing problem. Hard drive is not reading on sony laptop, you had said that error message possiblely indicated a hard drive going bad. Well took into computer shop to recover data after trying myself never would show that there was a external hard drive out of laptop connected to my other computer, tech had same trouble, HD is running and spinning but know electrical signal, tech says maybe to clean all contacts and this my work but would take a lot of time and was not positive about this at all and really did not encourage going this route. I have a lot of pictures and data that I would like to retrieve, so can try anything to try and get data since HD is shot anyway. I will install a new HD so as to avoid Vista, and reload all programs. Any suggestions on replacement 60 or 120Gig HD and brand.

Thanks, Stan

This was my last post in the previous thread:

If you use a USB enclosure then just leave the jumper as it was.

Are you sure that the enclosure and the drive connection are correct? The case had the proper connection adapter for the drive?

Are you booting with the USB connected or "hot plugging". Try both and see if there is a difference.

Just to verify: c & d are both partitions on the main computer?

Also is the enclosure USB 2? If so is the computer USB 2 as well?

The power question stands out as the interface difference between standard IDE drives (desktop) and SCSI drives (laptop) is that SCSI drives are 44 pin as they incorporate the extra 4 power pins that attach independently to an IDE drive.

What type of external case are you trying?

Any chance of trying this drive internally in another computer as slave?

In a worse case scenario you can send the drive to a professional recovery company who can dismantle the drive and read the disks inside. The only problem with this option is the co$t.

Jephree the computer tech took out the HD and connected it to a desktop with a connection you had refered to on one of your first replys. He said that the drive would run but he could not receive a signal from the HD as a slave drive. I used a enclosure from CompUSA which was a USB2 not sure about my old laptop or even where to look to verify whether it is or not. When connected to usb it would say there was a connection on usb connections, but when you clicked on computer under HD all that would show would be C and D partitions on one drive, no external drive even though you could hear the drive running. Tried connection both hot and cold, no difference, even tried the three different examples of jumping on hard drive cover. Tech has 9 different retrival setups. Maybe I need to try someone else. What brand HD has the best record.
Thanks, Stan

Some Recovery Googles:

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...drive+recovery

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&s...=data+recovery

In the extreme example I mentioned you would send your hard drive into a company which would dismantle your drive then take the disk(s) inside and read them on their own equipment. The data on the disks is probably fine it is just your mechanical drive that is not working (reading).

I would guess the later process would be in the minimum of several hundreds of dollars but I can search it further if you want.

My personal opinion on hard drives is #1 Maxtor & Seagate. Seagate now owns Maxtor. The most failure that I have had is with Western Digital.

I have never used a laptop however and this may be a completely different criteria.