Hard Drive

[bigal50]

I have a 500 Gb Sata Hard drive and when I hook it up to any other computer whether its  by a USA/Sata adapter or straight to the mother board with the Molex power supply and sata cable straight onto the mouther board the 500 Gb Hard drive powers up because I can hear it running. But yet it is not being read/identified or assigned a hard drive letter. I used the find new hardware option as well but still nothing but again the hard drive is getting power because i can hear and feel it. What could be wrong? What else can I do??? Help

Albert O>

[Lisa_maree]

Hi
With the drive connected by sata to the motherboard is it detected in the bios?
If it is but not shown when the computer boots then there is several causes.
The drive may be from a bios locked computer normally a laptop. So the Laptop starts and then shows a key symbol and you enter the key and the drive starts booting. in which case it is only accessible when plugged into that computer.

Is it is possible the drive has a lot of bad sectors or failing , if so then windows is not the best OS to be working on the drive as it will disable access to protect the data. In this case us a copy of Linux to access the drive.

Is the drive from a Apple Mac if so it will be in in HFS or APFs format which windows cannot read.

You could try Disk Management in Windows to see if the drive shows.