Problems with New computer detecting old hard drive..

Hello everyone, new here and I have a problem. I'm trying to install a 320 gig Western Digital Hard Drive WD3200AAJB into my wife's new Dell 7100 XPS. It has all of her photography photos (a few years worth) on this hard drive, so it is extremely important to her and me as well.

Hope my terminology is somewhat accurate haha. I ordered this product to help me convert the old EIDE hard drive to a SATA connection:
Newegg.com - Rosewill RC-204 IDE to SATA Mini Vertical Bridge (for IDE device)

And I also ordered this cable: Newegg.com - Vinpower Digital 26" SATA Cable With 1 Right Angle Connector And Metal Clip Model CAB90-180-L26(S)

I have the hd physically installed in the computer at the moment. Windows 7 is recognizing the hard drive in device manager as drive letter Q. However if I double click on it, it says that my access is denied. I also checked in the BIOS start up to detect it, and SATA port I and II are shown, but port III where the new drive is plugged in, is not detected.

We looked around but cannot find the install disk that came with the hd but I'm under the impression that I shouldn't necessarily need it? I tried the EIDE to SATA adapter on both jumper settings, with the hd set on slave jumpers. Go easy on me, my computer skills are lagging behind a bit haha.

I'm at a loss as to what to do next so any help or advice will be greatly appreciated. Heading to bed now, I will check this post tomorrow. Thanks for any help

Welcome Bob,


Can you give us a screen snip of Disk Management ?

LOL not easily. I'm about 1 hour new to Windows 7, and I'm not as computer savvy now as I was a few years ago. Sorry

Start :ar: Snipping Tool :ar: Save snip as a file :ar: Upload using the paperclip icon ^ above in the post reply.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/9733-screenshots-files-upload-post-seven-forums.html

hope this works...

Regardless what you do next, you should first make a copy of all that data to any external drive (since that data is so important for your wife) - possibly on the system from where the disk came. I see you experimenting a lot with this disk and the risk of losing your data is high.

Regarding the "Access denied", that may be a permission problem. You can try to take ownership. If that does not work, post back and we'll try something else.

BUT FIRST BACKUP THAT DATA !!!

Good snip, but it is only showing your primary hard drive, with the 3 factory partitions.

Where is the Q hard drive in disk management ?

It might be as simple as Right clicking on it & taking ownership.

DocBrown said:

Good snip, but it is only showing your primary hard drive, with the 3 factory partitions.

Where is the Q hard drive in disk management ?

It might be as simple as Right clicking on it & taking ownership.

Click to expand...

You could be right? And excellent advice on backing up the data, but I don't plan on doing ANYthing stupid until I'm sure what needs to be done.

Another good snip, do you get a Menu if you right click on Q:

DocBrown said:

Another good snip, do you get a Menu if you right click on Q:

Click to expand...

Yes I do. I think you might tell me next to click on the securtiy settings and work my way through until I find a screen at tells me no current owner, but that I can click on a list of owner names (my wifes being the only one) and take ownership of the hd?

This Local Disk Q looks like a virtual disk. Did you by chance install Office 2010 recently (but there are other programs that could have created it). If you reboot, it might go away.

But since Q does not show up in Disk Management, it does not exist as far as the OS is concerned.

Office 2010 IS installed on this computer, and I'm pretty certain it was a factory install from dell.

I might be wrong, but I think that the drive you see might not be your old hard drive. Did your computer come with Office 2010 installed? When Office 2010 is installed with default settings it creats a virtual hard disk labeled Q. It does not always appear immediately but if it doesn't it does very soon. Here is a link to a thread where Derekimo explains it all: http://www.sevenforums.com/microsoft-office/77328-office-2010-drive-q.html

EDIT: I see whs beat me to the punch. Great minds must think alike.

whs said:

This Local Disk Q looks like a virtual disk. Did you by chance install Office 2010 recently (but there are other programs that could have created it). If you reboot, it might go away.

But since Q does not show up in Disk Management, it does not exist as far as the OS is concerned.

Click to expand...

Good point whs , it does look like a vitural drive of Office

Bob,

I asume this computer has NO IDE connections on the MB, since you had to buy the adapter.

How many SATA connectors are on the MB ?

I believe there are 2 used from the factory and 3 unused, and I'm now using one of those 3 for the old hd.

I looked on newegg and found an extenal IDE hard drive enclosure. I looked at the prices and the reviews and this one seems to be the best for the money. If you can't get the computer to recognize it a different way, this might solve the problem.

Newegg.com - VANTEC Nexstar 3 NST-360U2-BL Aluminum 3.5" USB 2.0 External Enclosure

The only drawback is that this enclosure has no built in cooling mechanism. I recomend not leaving it plugged in all the time, as hard drive produce quite a bit of heat. An hour is okay, but being left on for several days at a time might be pushing it.

I thought about that, but the heat issue concerns me, plus my wife uses the computer quite a bit for her photography. Thats what made me decide to keep it an internal drive.

the small power adapter powers the adapter board & the other powers the old IDE drive. and one end plugs into a free cable from your power supply.

That plug adapter that comes with the card is useless for me. The power connections in the dell are different. They are the same width, but much thinner.