I have three drives that I shuffle in and out of the one enclosure. I don't see the advisability of buying three enclosures for a once-every-three-years look at an old drive. Obviously I didn't seat the connector properly when I pulled the previous occupant and installed this one a few days ago.
An enclosure is for constructing your own external HD for regular use, and can present problems that make it impractical for file rescue.
To merely connect to rescue files you only need something like this which has saved the day many times here: Amazon.com: SATA/PATA/IDE Drive to USB 2.0 Adapter Converter Cable for 2.5 / 3.5 Inch Hard Drive / Optical Drive with External AC Power Adapter: Computers & Accessories
Thanks again. I didn't know anything like that was available. It's not advertised in anything I read. So one of those pieces has the two-inch ribbon connector female on one end and the USB connector on the other? Another has power—four prong female on one end and wall plug on the other?
Yes, it can adapt any drive to plug in by USB or internally - even provide external power to do this.
However in several instances I could not get the 2.5 adapter to be recognized by USB, but when I adapted it to SATA to plug internally into PC the data was read. So this is likely the best approach for a laptop HD.
The one I have was made by Rosewill Newegg.ca - Rosewill RCW-608 USB2.0 Adapter For IDE/SATA Device (Include Protection case) It had no problem reading 2.5 inch laptop IDE drives.
Might be the price which makes the difference.
Hard to say, maybe you just got a defective one. I bought mine specifically to get some files off of a laptop IDE drive. Having it do all drive types was a bonus. If I had had a drive caddy on hand that would have worked I'd have used it in a pinch. This isn't something I use all that often but I have wanted one for a while so I bought it. I've been very happy with mine so far.
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