I am an avid purchaser of music. I own hundreds of dollars worth of CDs and digital albums. Usually I keep my music library backed up on spare hard drive. Well, yesterday my laptop decided to stop working entirely (it had shown signs of it for a while), so today I went and bought a new laptop. Well, a few minutes ago I went to use my back up hard drive to transfer my music library onto my new laptop. Yeah...it didn't work, at all. I hadn't used it in a few months so maybe that's the problem. So, I have an external hard drive enclosure (or whatever it's called), so I tried the hard drive out of my laptop, however my new laptop won't even recognize it, I tried another old internal hard drive from a laptop that had stopped working, and my laptop wouldn't recognize it either. Oh joy.

To begin a new wall of text, it appears that I've just lost all of my digital music. Yay. Remember, it's all purchased, from Amazon, eMusic, iTunes, Bandcamp, etc etc. Every single song was acquired in a legitimate way. Hundreds of dollars worth, hundreds of albums.

Now, a question: Since my new laptop wouldn't recognize either internal hard drive in my hard drive enclosure, perhaps it's the enclosure that is a problem, instead of the hard drives themselves? Or is that me clinging to a stupid idea?




I know this is my second thread today, but they're two different topics.

If you had set it to question this time like you wanted in your last post, someone can get credit for it.

Anyway, at this point anything can go. It can be drivers, something in the bios, maybe something else in your laptop or yes the enclosure.
It's not a stupid idea to think that or believe anything is lost, yet.

You might want to go to the command prompt (windows button>run) and type diskmgmt.msc to see if your drive is showing up there.

Yeah I probably shouldn't make threads at two or three in the morning. Thanks for helping!

Anyway, the hard drive (in the enclosure) shows up in Devices and Drivers as a local drive, but doesn't appear at all in Disk Management, it also sort of freezes my computer. Any ideas?

I never had enclosures or a laptop, so that's stuff i am sure someone else would have more knowledge about, but i can try. have you checked the drive in devices and drivers and the tabs there if it shows anything weird?
Also have you checked if there are any drivers available for the disk and ifso used them?

To me, having legitimately purchased the music already means you can get the music again from a source like Piratebay and still hold your head up high.

(just throwing that out there even though I didn't read your post thoroughly :P)

So have you taken the internal HDD from your original laptop, and now try to access it on another PC, using an USB enclosure?

Maybe some Windows expert can tell more, but could there be some kind of Windows user access control thingie deciding that you are not supposed to be able to access the hard drive, unless you're logged in as that user? Have you tried to access it on some other PC (using the same enclosure)? Is the HDD possibly encrypted, e.g. was it your work laptop?

Also, in some cases the HDD might be signed for the original device, ie. it is usable only with the original device (in this case, your broken laptop). But frankly I think that is only used with e.g. gaming consoles so that you can't take the internal HDD and use it with some other console (or PC), some kind of anti-hacking technique I guess. At least the original HDD from my classic XBox is blocked from working anywhere outside that XBox, can't format it to use as a generic PC HDD etc.

Oh, and is the enclosure USB-powered? In that case it is possible it is not getting enough power for the HDD to operate correctly, so you might have to use an enclosure that gets extra power (either with its own power cable, or a second USB connection). Also make sure the USB cord is connected directly to one of the USB ports, not through an USB hub or even an USB extension cord. Those sometimes make my external USB-powered HDD not to work properly.

To add to Timppu's post:
It is unlikely that all your drives went bad at once, they seldom go bad just from not using them as long as treated carefully.

Is it possible that the USB interface on your enclosure is an old 1.1 or 1.2 version and the new lappie requires 2.0 or better?
Trying the enclosure on another machine would be my first step in troubleshooting.

Edit: If you post more details I'll be back this afternoon and see if I can help.

Assuming your new laptop uses Win 8:

1/ try pluging the "enclosure" to another usb port. Check whether you have both usb 2.0 and 3.0 ports. Older drive enclosures could have issues when connected to modern usb ports

2/ check your drivers

a) press Windows Key + R, type “devmgmt.msc” into the Run dialog, and press Enter
b) under Disk drives,check for any devices with a yellow exclamation mark next to them. If any, you have a driver issue
c) in that case, updating the driver could be your best option

I've read all the responses so far, and I thank you for taking the time to help!

So far no luck, I'll see about getting a new hard drive enclosure as the one I have is about two years old and thus may be outdated.

To further prove why I shouldn't create threads at three or four in the morning, when I say "It Happened Again", I meant to add somewhere in my post that this is the second time I've lost a lot of digital items after a computer became unusable. The first time I was dumb and didn't have any kind of backups, this time I have backups and still (as of writing) seem to have lost all of my items. Awesome.

If the new hdd case itself doesn't make them accessible again, it might be worth downloading some linux live that you can run from an usb stick. Just a different OS with different drivers that might be able to read the disks, or give some hint why it can't.

A completely unrelated trick, dying harddrives sometimes can be convinced to work a last time when cold, put it in the fridge (plastic bag against condensation!) before trying. But both dying in sync makes me suspect the drives are fine.

I actually just tried the Linux Live trick an hour or so ago, it didn't work either, but hey, I have a USB that can load Linux now, so that's cool.

Out of curiosity, isn't the "put the hard drive in the freezer" trick a myth? I've seen people talk about it both ways, and I'm just skeptical. Then again I was skeptical about putting Doritos on my mayo sandwich and...actually nevermind.

If all else fails (including getting a new enclosure), I can always see if I got a System Restore disc with my old laptop, and see if I can reinstall/repair it (that has worked for me in the past). Also, why don't laptops come with those discs anymore anyway? My last three laptops haven't had them.

best thing is always to have a spare computer at hand (i mean even if you dont, there must be someone nearby who does), try it there to see if you get the same results.
if it is then the harddrives or the enclosure is more likely the cause.

I've seen two bad drives getting into a nonstop writing frenzy that overheated them badly, in this case cooling could buy time. You mentioned unspecific signs of the upcoming failure, it might have been something like that. Otherwise probably useless, I agree.

Agree with the Linux live, some are made specifically for recovery use, check Distrowatch.com

The freezer trick is NOT a myth, I've used it several times and saved 'hopeless' data.

Most new laptops come with an installed utility to create a restore CD/DVD, most people ignore it and never make one.

Good Luck! ;)

Digital purchases from Amazon and iTunes can be re-downloaded, so don't worry too much about those.