I don’t recall this being so difficult the last time I did this. HP Pavilion laptop handed to me to try to recover the HDD – the power supply/button on the laptop has failed (confirmed) but they just want the data off the HDD.

I have an IDE/SATA HDD caddy using USB 2, so I remove the hard drive form the laptop, plug it into the caddy and plug it into my PC…and my PC doesn’t detect anything.

The caddy has power (when powered, a red LED on the front lights up…nothing seems to happen when it is plugged into the PC. I’ve tried it with just USB plugged into the PC – then switched PC on; tried it just USB with machine already on; tried it with power and USB to caddy and plugged into PC and turned PC on; tried it with power on caddy, switch PC on and then plug USB into PC – nothing seems to be making it detect that a device has been plugged in.

PC is a Windows 10 HP device as well.

Any suggestion son how I get this accessible so I can transfer the content to an external HDD for them, please?

Is it Bitlockered?

Is it broken?

Can you use an external PSU for the caddy?  Shouldn’t need to, but USB power can be a funny bugger.

How did you confirm the power button is dead rather than the machine or HDD? Do you definitely know the hdd works? Have you got it fully plugged into the caddy? Have you tried other drives in the caddy? Does that drive work in other caddies? Assuming it’s hdd rather than ssd, can you hear it spinning up when plugged in and powered up?

A laptop power switch is just a momentary contact micro switch, so fairly easy to bodge around if you wanted to fix the original latptop, or test the hdd in the original laptop.

Oh,

When you say “nothing,” do you mean in Explorer?  Does it appear in Disk Manager?

Also… Is the usb port on your desktop pc usb 3? If so, I’ve had problems with usb 2 HDD caddies in usb 3 ports.

A 6 quid usb 3 eBay caddy special was the answer in my case.

Also, y’know, you need to have the “backup” conversation with them.

I’m so sick of banging this drum that I’m often tempted to say “no, it can’t be done” so they’re more careful next time.

PC World confirmed the power was fubar’d on the laptop…they wanted something like £120 to fix it and being a student he turned it down. Strangely, they also confirmed the HDD was still working and they could ‘recover’ it for him but it would also delete all the content on it – he asked how that was a recovery and for an extra £40 (or something) they could move the data from the laptop HDD to his portable drive…so he turned that down as well.

Caddy has a power socket and I’ve used that – the caddy (with HDD installed) and either USB 2 cable or both power and USB cable plugged in, is plugged into the PC and there is nothing happening.

Without the power cable plugged in, if I unplug the USB 2 cable (in a USB 2 port), then the laptop HDD ‘stops’, it was obviously spinning but you then hear a noise like it is stopping. If the power cable is plugged into the caddy, it does that same thing when that is unplugged (if the USB cable is also unplugged).

Device Manager doesn’t see it and as far as I can tell (by asking him), the laptop HDD wasn’t locked or encrypted with anything.

I’m completely baffled by it…and it is annoying me as I’m trying to get his uni work moved off it – he had a backup up until Christmas, but typically, he’s done a stack of work since and can’t lose it – backup chat has been had before he went to uni, during and again when he asked me for help!

Disk Manager, not Device Manager.

does the PC recognise the device without the HDD in it?

Yes, sorry Disk Manager…doesn’t recognise it no matter how many rescans I try.

Unsure what would be detected if the HDD wasn’t plugged into the caddy…I’m assuming it is the HDD that is detected and the caddy just allows you a means of plugging it in – is that right? Plugging in without the HDD attached, the caddy lights up the red LED on it, but nothing happens on the desktop – no sound to confirm something has been attached (actually even with the HDD attached to the caddy, no sound is made).

Yep.

So, what sequence should things be plugged in/turned on? The sequences I’ve tried are below.

A – USB plugged into caddy

B – USB plugged into pc

C – turn on pc

D – power caddy

C, a, b

A, d, c, b

A, d, b, c

A, c, b

A, b, c

D, a, b, c

None of these have the laptop hdd detected by the pc.

I have a W10 laptop that’s very fussy about the USB ports that it wants to use (it varies!) and won’t detect some micro SD cards in the micro SD slot, but will detect them in a USB adapter

If it’s none of the power/USB suggestions above, then try running a Linux live distro and see if that will detect the external drive. You should be able to see all of the files too

Forget the USB caddy and plug the disk direct into a spare SATA port on the pc mother board plus power ofc.

Use mini tool partition wizard to see if the disk is recognised and that there is a valid partition.

If this fails it’s Fubar to the average user.

I would be very suspicious of what PCWorld have done to it, its just possible they could still “recover” it depending on what they did and whether it is even the original drive in there – however it does also seem to be

possible that the caddy or something is not allowing you to access the drive.

looking at the drive with a linux system makes it easy to see the SMART data from the drive – this tells you about the health of the drive itself , you can use a free utility like crystaldiskinfo  on windows .

So got a USB3->Sata plug and plugged it in – 2 USB posts – 1 for data and 1 for power – the drive is now detected by Disk Manager but still not showing on Explorer. Disk Manager won’t allow me to change the name of the drive…is there a ‘Dos’ (Command line) process I can try to see if that will allow me to assign a drive letter to it?

The Drive Manager reports each partition on the disk is ‘Healthy’, there is only 1 partition that allows me to ‘Change drive letter’ but when I select it I get an error saying Disk Manager needs to be refreshed and try again, if that doesn’t work, close and restart Disk Manager or restart the computer – done all 3 options and still getting the message.

Almost there, so thanks for the advice so far.

Again: is it encypted?

Nope, no encryption…

Plug it straight into a sata port on the motherboard, if it’s not encrypted, you should be able to read it like a book..

It’s probably buggered then.

Two courses of action,

1) have a look at Recuva – I’ve never used it personally but had it recommended by people whose opinion I trust, and

2) as others have said, have a look at it from Linux, see if it appears any differently.

A word of caution, I would be very hesitant to do anything that potentially could make changes to the disk in case you hose it completely.  If it’s showing a single partition then unless it’s an XP disk it’s not just as simple as a drive letter issue, there should be at least two partitions on a system drive.

My next step would be to try and get the laptop turned on, I’d be suspicious that it is ‘just’ a power button problem, but if it is, turning the laptop on might be as simple as shorting two pins on the motherboard with a small screwdriver.

Got it fixed – cabling it in to the PC didn’t work so I unplugged my HDD and plugged the laptop one in, rebooted and got it all sorted – thanks for all the advice.