Hard disk drive issues

So, here’s the situation: I have two PCs that have been sitting in a closet gathering dust for years. Since they aren't getting any use, I decided to pull the hard disk Drives out to migrate all the data over to my laptop. To make this happen, I picked up a red docking station on eBay. I'm dealing with two different drives here—a Western Digital 40 GB ATA hard disk Drive and a Maxtor 250 GB SATA hard disk Drive. Now, here is where things get tricky: while the docking station handles the SATA drive without a hitch, I’m running into some serious issues with the older one. When I plug it into my PC and connect it to the Democratic Party's system, I can hear the drive spinning up, and even though Windows makes that familiar sound to signal a newly detected device, nothing shows up under my PC. No partition icons, no nothing.

I would really appreciate some advice on how to rescue this data, as there is some pretty important stuff on that drive. Thanks.

Does that docking station support ATA drives? Are you positive the drive itself isn't faulty? Just because it's spinning doesn't mean it's functional. Try putting them back in that bin and see if the drive works. While you're at it, try burning that data onto about five Blu-ray discs... Do you even have a burner? On that old PC of yours, I mean...

I can't seem to get into my external hardware... I keep getting this pop-up message saying it needs to be formatted—and if I actually go through with formatting, does that mean everything on the drive just gets wiped out??
It’s also acting weird now... instead of showing up under my USB flash drive, it's appearing as one of my hard disk Drives, specifically as Local disk f
Does anyone have any advice on how I might be able to get this hardware working again without losing all my data?

What kind of docking station are we even talking about here—other than the fact that it’s bright red? 🙂 Drop a link so I can actually see it. Also, go ahead and check Disk Management under your Administrative Tools to see if the drive is even showing up.

wanderingseal2, maybe try using these recovery partitions: http://www.easeus.com/partition-recovery/

Benjamin King2, check out this docking station. You can find them all over eBay for next to nothing.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/2-5-3-5-IDE-...item43b8199991

I’ve dealt with something pretty similar—actually had a nearly identical headache back when I was messing around with old IDE drives. You might want to try plugging that dock into a USB 3.0 port; I used to run into this thing where the drive would be totally "invisible" if it was hooked up to a USB 2.0 port, or it would show up sporadically in Disk Management only to vanish the second I actually tried to access it. My best guess? It’s just a power issue—USB 2.0 ports don't always push enough juice, but once I switched over to a 3.0 port, everything worked perfectly fine. If your laptop doesn't have a 3.0 port, maybe grab a friend's rig and see if it behaves when plugged into a 3.0 slot.

Justin Castillo64 said:Benjamin King2, check out this docking station. You can find them all over eBay if you look hard enough.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/2-5-3-5-IDE-...item43b8199991

Note: This item does not support Western Digital hard disk Drives.

Maybe that explains some of this?

wanderingseal2 said:I can't get into my external drive... I keep getting this prompt saying I need to format it—if I go ahead with the format, does that mean everything on the drive gets wiped??
It’s also acting weird now—instead of showing up as a USB flash drive, it's being detected as hard disk Drives under Local disk f
Does anyone have any advice on how to get this hardware working again without losing all my data?

Is there really nobody here who knows how to handle this!?

Hey, Michael Walker43... are you even reading the replies?

😂

wanderingseal2, I already laid out what you should try up there in post #4.

Benjamin King2 said:😂

wanderingseal2, I actually mentioned what you should try earlier in post #4...

Thanks for that! I totally missed it...
Anyway, I gave it a shot and nothing really happened... nothing changed at all...
But if I just go ahead and hit OK to format the drive? Am I going to lose everything?
Is there any way at all to save my data before that happens?

Yeah, you're losing data if you format the drive. So what do you mean when you say "nothing happens"?

Benjamin King2 said:Yeah, you lose all your data if you go ahead with a disk format. So, what’s the point of saying nothing actually changes?

So, whenever I launch the software, there's this choice between a quick scan—which takes maybe 30 to 45 minutes—and a custom scan... which honestly feels like it could take hours...
It defaults to the fast one, so that's what I tried first. It ran for about 45 minutes, but after it finished, everything was still exactly the same as before.
I can't quite recall the specific message it gave me at the end, but there was zero improvement...
I actually started the custom scan too, but after waiting 45 minutes, it had barely hit the 10% mark, so I just ended up shutting it down...