Connecting Old Hard Drive

[tornfleshofsoul]

So I finally pulled out my old Desktop to see if I could get her running again, no luck. I pulled out the Hard drive and ordered IDE > USB cables etc etc. They finally came, hooked it all up and my Laptop isn't recognizing the Desktop hard drive. The Desktop was an 80G running Windows XP, Laptop is DELL XPS 1530 running windows 7.

Do I need to (and how do I?) change the Desktop hard drive to a slave drive, if so, how do I do it when the old Desktop won't start up (Motherboard got fried) Or is there something else I need to do.

[chiyio]

I'd set it to cable select or master. you do that with the jumper pins on the back of the drive. You don't need to connect it to the old desktop at all to change it. I've got an ide -> usb cable set and they usually just work fine. Try plugging in the drive and letting it spin up before you connect it to your laptop. Could be it got fried along with your MB if you are unlucky.

Does it say anything about detecting a usb device at all?

[tornfleshofsoul]

No detection of USB device at all when I plug in, or if I restart with it plugged in.

[chiyio]

if you've got everything connected correctly, and it's not even seeing a usb device, then either the usb converter kit you got doesn't work, or, MUCH more likely your drive is toast. sorry

I've had mine like 5 years. It was like $5 and I've always been able to see the drive, if the drive was working at all.

One last thing to try, some usb ports on laptops are weird and have power settings you can set in the bios. Maybe your usb adapter doesn't like your laptop. Try it on a desktop at a friends house and see what happens.

[tornfleshofsoul]

if you've got everything connected correctly, and it's not even seeing a usb device, then either the usb converter kit you got doesn't work, or, MUCH more likely your drive is toast. sorry

I've had mine like 5 years. It was like $5 and I've always been able to see the drive, if the drive was working at all.

One last thing to try, some usb ports on laptops are weird and have power settings you can set in the bios. Maybe your usb adapter doesn't like your laptop. Try it on a desktop at a friends house and see what happens.

Yeah, was planning on trying this. My brother got a kit for his old laptop HD and his works just fine, so gonna try on his comp to see if mine works there