I purchased a USB to SATA/IDE cable connector in the hopes of salvaging data from what I think might be a busted laptop HD. I dropped my laptop from my lap to the floor (not a very considerable distance, but apparently enough to do damage) and began getting a "Media test failure" error when I tried to boot. After much googling, it looks like it could be the hard drive or possibly the motherboard. At any rate, it wouldn't boot, so a last ditch effort (as I haven't backed up the drive and it has important pictures on it that I'd be very sad to lose), I purchased the cable. After hooking it up to my desktop computer, it recognizes the laptop hard drive as a new disk drive and shows up in Device Manager, and give me the "Safely remove hardware" icon in the taskbar. However, it does NOT show up in Disk Management so I can assign it a letter or anything, and doesn't show up in My Computer.
Any advice? Or should I just chalk it up to a mistake and try to move on?
Not that it'll help, but the HD is a Toshiba 80G SATA, and was running off Vista. My desktop that I'm trying to locate the drive with is an HP Pavilion running Windows XP. Any help would be greatly appreciated.