External IDE drive problem

chait · 25 Oct 2010

My old setup was Win XP, 500MB SATA drive and a 500MB external IDE drive in an Acomdata enclosure via USB. Motherboard is Asus M2A-MVP.

The boot drive died, so I got a new 2TB SATA drive, installed Win 7 Home Ed upgrade on it. I believe the external worked when the computer was first up and running. Then I wanted to see if I can save the files from the old drive, connected it inside the computer, and downloaded a bunch of free software from download.com. But now, the external drive cannot be read by Win 7. Drive Management shows that it is allocated and active but no NTFS file system. HOWEVER, other Win 7 and Win XP computers can see all the files. Tried some old IDE drives in the enclosure and they all behave the same.

I tried connecting the IDE drive directly to the motherboard. Also removed all the downloaded software, and tried reinstalling Win 7, but no luck. The only way I got it to work is to connect the external drive to the lap top, then connect the laptop to the Win 7 via Tornado File Transfer. Any ideas? thanks!

LiquidSnak · 25 Oct 2010

chait said:

Tried some old IDE drives in the enclosure and they all behave the same.

They behave the same in your machine, as in they cannot be read, or they are fine?

chait · 26 Oct 2010

LiquidSnak said:

chait said:

Tried some old IDE drives in the enclosure and they all behave the same.

They behave the same in your machine, as in they cannot be read, or they are fine?

Same in that they cannot be read in my Win 7 but is OK with other Win 7 systems.

Zeplash · 26 Oct 2010

Have you tried shifting the jumper on the back of the HD...You can remove it and try aswell,just shutdown the pc beforehand..Let me know..

tongks · 26 Oct 2010

From your description, your IDE enclosure + old IDE drive should be working fine.

Check 1st whether it is your desktop hardware problem or Win 7 software driver problem, or your mobo require BIOS update for Win 7.

To confirm if it is hardware problem, first get yourself a Live Bootable CD such as Ubuntu Live CD or make a bootable UBCD4Win CD, these are very useful CD and great tool especially if you make it into bootable USB.

Once you got the Live/Bootable CD ready, make sure to first connect your IDE drive either internally or thru USB externally, then set your BIOS to 1st boot from CD. The live CD will let you see/explore/copy files in your IDE drive if your PC hardware okay.

LiquidSnak · 26 Oct 2010

Yes, that is a good thing to try.

chait · 26 Oct 2010

OK, got Ubuntu, and viola the disk and files are all there. So what does that mean?
Moved some files over but it reported "not enough space" even though it copied ok.

There does not seem to be a Win 7 Bios updated for the mobo. Tried switching jumpers but did not help.

LiquidSnak · 26 Oct 2010

Can you maybe do a system restore back to when the drive was working?

Zeplash · 27 Oct 2010

In device manager open your HD list and rightclick the problem disk,,switch to driver at the top > then "roll back" the current HD driver....First see if it even picks up in device manager...

tongks · 27 Oct 2010

chait said:

OK, got Ubuntu, and viola the disk and files are all there. So what does that mean?

Meaning your PC hardware is working fine. Now you can concentrate on Win 7 problem, could be chipset/IDE/SATA/RAID/AHCI driver or BIOS setting.

chait said:

Moved some files over but it reported "not enough space" even though it copied ok.

The Live CD is using your RAM to work, it is not using your drive C.