IDE hard drive dock won't work-any advice?

martin57

Hi all,

I bought one of these on ebay so to add a spare internal 320 gb ide hard drive I had lying around.


http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Dual-IDE-SATA-HDD-Hard-Disk-Drive-Dock-Docking-Station-/280612726120?pt=UK_Collectables_HardDriveEnclosures_RL&hash=item4155d26568

I can't get it to work though, the hard drive is fine as I tried it in a computer, I have made sure it was bedded into the connections on the docking station ok and I went into disk management on my computer so as to try and see it there. A message about a disk does appear and says it needs to be initalised but once I try that it says there is an error. No options whatsoever to format or allocate any space to this disk totally greyed out.

I have tried it on a few computers and with windows xp and windows 7 but no good.

I have it packed up ready to go back as I think there is definitely something wrong with the docking station. I will request a refund as to be honest I probably think this kind of item is not too reilable.

Has anyone got one of these working ok and any tips in case I am doing something wrong.

thanks a lot
Martin57

DD3006

We had one of these exact models at work and had a similar problem where it only showed up some of the time and wasent very reliable.. turned out to be a dodge usb cable.

So if you have a spare usb cable that will fit the dock try that... you never know.

forever.insane

Can't you just buy another IDE ribbon cable and plug it inside directly? It would make more sense.

But yes, try another cable and USB cable, just to rule them out. If not then I'd get a refund on the dock.

closed

you are using the power supply with it? If it's an ide drive, is it set to master?

martin57

closed wrote: »

you are using the power supply with it? If it's an ide drive, is it set to master?

Good question, I was under the impression that it didn't matter if the jumpers were set to master since the drive was to fit in the docking station, if someone could be good enough to let me know as the docking station is all packed up and the drive has been put back into the old computer. Trying a different usb cable made no difference.

thanks
martin57

forgotmyname

Having a similar issue with a seagate external drive, Vanishes from device manager and i plugged it in once
and it asked me if i wanted to format it. All my photo's are on there.

Bought it after i lost lots of photo's on an internal drive.

closed

don't know for sure, but some require it to be set to master or cs, not slave, should say it in the instructions (if there are any). And it will need to be powered with external power

forgotmy, recuva can sometimes recover photo's from drives, if they can be seen in windows (your old drive)