HARD DISK NOT

RECOGNIZED BY COMPUTER?

  

I upgraded my hard disk in my computer to a larger drive, so I took out my old system disk (3.5 SATA), put it in a USB enclosure and have been using it as an external drive. At first, I was able to boot into the disk to get old files off of it, or write to it directly when it was mounted as a slave (I shrank the main partition and added a FAT32 partition for storage). But lately, I’ve noticed that the disk has become less reliable, sometimes failing read/write operations for no reason and sometimes not even showing up at all in Windows. Now, I can’t get my computer to recognize it at all. What should I do?

   Ah, the ol’ internal disk to external disk conversion via USB enclosure. I’ve tried this myself, and I’ve run into the same problems. My first mistake (and probably yours) was buying a cheap USB enclosure and expecting it to perform reliably. For infrequent usage, such as one-time offloading or periodic backups, a USB enclosure is perfectly fine. But if you are booting into your old Windows installation and using it for hours on end, it can cause problems (heat being the biggest one). A USB enclosure just isn’t as reliable or efficient as a straight SATA connection and things can go awry.
   

But it sounds like you were making the problem even worse. As I understand it, you were using the enclosure drive cum external USB drive as both a system disk and a mass storage device. My suspicion is that the repartitioning didn’t go as smoothly as you thought it did, and your drive may be partially or completely corrupted. Hopefully, that’s the case and it hasn’t had a mechanical failure.
 

Here’s what I would do: first, check the health of your disk to see if it is failing. Seagate makes a utility that lets you do this called Seatools. Seatools can often detect your disk, even if it’s not showing up as a valid logical disk in Windows.

 

If the disk is showing signs of failure, it’s important to create an image of the disk right away. This will stop any further damage or corruption. Run a data recovery on the image and save your files to another healthy disk.
 

If the disk is healthy, but the logical disk is corrupt, you can run a data recovery without imaging, reformat the disk and start fresh.

 

If the disk can’t be detected by Seatools, I might try taking it out of the enclosure and connecting it directly via a SATA cable. The enclosure may be failing, rather than the disk itself.

 

In the future, I would invest in a higher end enclosure that is designed for cooling and heavy data transfer. Or, stop being so stingy and buy a real external hard drive!
 
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