[JakeWalkaa]

My old laptop, a compaq pressario lasted me a couple of years.
Although it was cheap, it seemed reliable.

About a month ago, it overheated and burnt out my graphics card and CPU.
I removed my hard drive which was running on Vista and set it aside.

I am now stuck running Windows 2000 on an old PC, till I can afford a new laptop.
This could be a while as I am out of work and have a lot of events coming up which need paying for.
So I'm preparing to be stuck with this computer for a bit.

I thought about buying a SATA to USB cable and did some reading up,
Everything was saying I could simply plug in my laptops hard drive and use it as an External hard drive on my PC.

This all sounded great so I spent my money on this thinking I could retrieve my old files which I needed.
And make us of the extra space.

Today my cable finally arrived and I was pretty excited so I plugged it in and straight away I could smell components burning.

So I ripped out the power and had a look,
turns out the people had wired the SATA cable wrong.
So I rewired this in hope my hard drive hadn't been destroyed.

Now I plugged the Hard Drive into my computer and it doesn't show in any drive but in Device Manager and Safely Remove Hardware I can see it is connected and working fine.

I've tried running Disk Management and creating it as a new partition,
But it doesn't show in there.

I tried on my mums laptop which runs XP and it has the exact same problem.

Can somebody PLEASE help me with this.

I really want my old files back.



Walka

[saikee]

The information would indicate your hard drive, after you have rewired it yourself, no longer detected by two computer runing WIndows systems.

There is no information if you have wired it correctly or if the drive has suffered damaged when you first used the Sata to USB cable which you claim has been wried incorrectly.

A modern 2.5" Sata disk from a laptop most likely requires >0.5 Amp power supply from the USB port which can only supply a maximum of 0.5A. The power consumption is stamped on every hard drive. Thus unless you have a separate power supply it is rather unlikely that you are feeding the hard disk with adequate current. A USB hard disk normally needs a twin head cable to draw power from 2 USB ports to run it successfully.

In your situation it pays to put the hard disk in a standard USB hard disk enclosure and try to see if the disk is recognised by a PC.

If you ever format the hard drive you can kiss your data goodbye.

[fancier]

By your description "I could smell components burning", it seems that the PCB of your hard disk drive has gotten burnt. The PCB holds up many components and wiring the wrong way is likely to damage your PCB. I recently had exactly the same problem - i.e. wrong wiring of the power cable, although my hard disk drive was a Seagate 1 TB, 3.5 inches, SATA desktop drive. I tried swapping the PCB from a similar drive but to no avail. Then I came across certain information which stated that for the PCB swap to work correctly, not only the model number of the drive has to be same, but even the firmware revision number has to be the same. Since I had some critical data stored on the drive, I really had to get it to function back again. Not to miss, I approached professional data recovery agents for help with my disk and was given an estimate of Indian Rupees 60,000/- (USD 1200/- approx.)! But then I came across this website hxxp://onepcbsolution.com (replace xx in hxxp with tt), which specializes in firmware transfer and PCB's, and thanks to them my hard disk drive is back to life again for a nominal fee of Indian Rupees 2500/- (USD 50/- approx.). My suggestion to you is, that if you really need your data back try the firmware transfer with them and get a new absolutely same PCB from them. You'll have to ship your damaged (looks like) PCB to them though, for the firmware transfer.

Hope you get your data back!