Is it possible that this hard drive is still good?

Factual Questions
1

I am not an expert, so keeping things as simple as possible would be appreciated.

This is a hard drive from a laptop that is about seven years old, and worked fine when it was last used three or four years back. The AC adapter for the laptop is missing, so I took the hard drive out, and connected it to my hard drive adapter, and plugged it into my new computer. The hard drive doesn’t show up in My Computer, but it is listed in Computer management. The disk shows as not being initialized, and says “disk is not ready” when I try to initialize it. Rescanning it doesn’t do anything. Is there anything else I can try, or should it just be tossed?

I don’t know if it matters, but I think the old computer was running XP, and the new one is running Windows 7.

2

Right click on My Computer, and click and Manage. Go to the Disk Management tab. Does it appear there? If so, can you right click on it and choose Format?

edit: Oh, Win7, not XP. Click start, then type diskmgmt.msc into the search box and run that.

3

When I right click, a menu pops up that says “initialize disk, offline, properties, and help.”

There aren’t any other options.

4

If you can get hold of a copy of Spinrite try that, I have had Spinrite repair drives that can’t even be detected in BIOS.

Failing that try a live CD for ubuntu, Linux distros usually have more success at reading data from a drive than Windows.

5

If you don’t need to recover files from this system, it’s probably not worth spending much time or money trying to get it to work. A seven-year-old drive is much smaller than recent ones (and it’s clearly a flaky drive).

6

Some things to check:

Did you set the Master/Slave/Cable Select jumpers correctly? Go to the makers web site and get the settings for your drive and any other drive on the same cable. Double and triple check it.

On booting your computer, go into the BIOS (pressing F8/Del/Whatever to do that). Then check if the BIOS correctly sees the drive. Make sure its capacity matches the manufacturer’s spec.

Another thing to note is if the drive originally had some disk software on it to handle large drives in BIOSes that couldn’t handle them. This would be a pain to deal with.

7

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. I’ll try them out tomorrow.