Recovering data off an old HD?

[Odesseiron]

Okay so after last night's thread about my awful boot time, I went out and picked up another HDD today. Old one is a 2-3 year old Seagate. I tried to hook it up externally with an external booter (don't know the proper name) the disk spins and all, but is not recognized at all by the systems, or bios. I think it's dead.

I'm now looking into data recovery. Microcenter does it at a fairly resonable rate I've heard. There's nothing majorly important on it. Mostly backup copies of torrented games, DS games, some music and other stuff. It's no major loss, and I can get it again, but I'm curious if there is any other way of recovering the data.

[sruon]

Try to see if Partition Magic detects it, if it doesn't... idk

if it does, try to (quick) format and see if the HDD works again, then use Recueva to recover datas.

[Balthasar]

Seems kind of simple, maybe you overlooked it, but does it have a jumper on it? If so, did you take it out? If you're booting from the new drive, and the jumper on the old drive is still on, the old drive won't be detected.

[Serra]

Figured I'd bump this thread instead of starting another..

So I have a WD 500 gb external HD that is mostly full of music, movies, and anime (and my FF screenshot archive...). Anyway, last night I turned on my desktop, it wouldn't recognize the HD. It sounds like it's perpetually starting up and then powering down, over and over. It's not making any other sounds or anything like that. There's no clicking sounds or anything like that, so that's one less worry, although I dunno how much of one that is.. The computer recognizes there's a drive plugged in, but says it's got no space and only recognizes it as a logical drive, not a physical one.

When I turned it on today, it didn't make the sound of it spinning up/down, it just started up and was constantly spinning for 10 mins or so till I turned it off. There are a series of lights (supposed to show how full it is) that just cycle constantly when it's on. Normally they do this when I'm downloading something to it or accessing something on it, so maybe that info helps?

I've tried it on both my desktop and laptop and got the same results. Tried with different USB cables too. I don't remember downloading anything or updating anything the last time I used it. Only thing I did the last time it worked was move some music over from my laptop to it, and then loaded said music into itunes.

Has anyone had anything like this happen/have any advice? I've read that sometimes it's the enclosure the fails with these things, so I'm looking into getting an SATA to USB cable so I can try if removing that element fixes it, but if anyone else knows a solution, I'd be much obliged.

[Icari]

I would try the hard drive without the enclosure and see if it works, you could also see if it would fit in your desktop's case. Otherwise it looks like you may be out of luck without trying to get the data rescued off the disk. You could also see if once you get can get the disk out if you can find a new enclosure to put it in and see if that works.