Any way to connect 10-yr old ATA drive (via USB caddy?) to Win7 PC?

[AL_n]

Hi all,

I have several old hard drives from my older PC's Most are at least 8 years
old from when I had a PC running Win XP.

I woould like to access the data on them, but only have a Windows 7 PC now.

I tried loading the drives into an old caddy with a USB connection. I could
hear the drives whirring in the caddy, but none of them showed up in my
Win7 file explorer. Would that be because the drives are old ATA drives? I
think one of them is SATA.

If that's the case, is there a caddy that can convert the ATA/SATA signal
into modern format that my Win7 PC can read?

Thanks...

Al

 

[Charlie Hoffpauir]

Hi all,

I have several old hard drives from my older PC's Most are at least 8 years
old from when I had a PC running Win XP.

I woould like to access the data on them, but only have a Windows 7 PC now.

I tried loading the drives into an old caddy with a USB connection. I could
hear the drives whirring in the caddy, but none of them showed up in my
Win7 file explorer. Would that be because the drives are old ATA drives? I
think one of them is SATA.

If that's the case, is there a caddy that can convert the ATA/SATA signal
into modern format that my Win7 PC can read?

Thanks...

Al

It sounds like either your drives are bad, or you don't have the pins
set correctly (ie master/slave). There's nothing about ATA (or PATA)
drives that make them incompatible with Win7. I'm running win 7 and
have several old PATA drive that I routinely connect to my computer
via a USB adapter. I took apart an old external drive case that I had
that supported PATA drives to USB, and took the printed Circuit board
and connectors and use that to connect various PATA bare drives via
USB.
BTW. you motherboard may have a PATA pinout, if so all you need is a
cable to install a drive "in" your computer. I had a 500 GB PATA drive
in my Win 7 for a time before I bought a 1 TB SATA drive to replace
it.

 

[Flasherly]

Hi all,

I have several old hard drives from my older PC's Most are at least 8 years
old from when I had a PC running Win XP.

I woould like to access the data on them, but only have a Windows 7 PC now.

I tried loading the drives into an old caddy with a USB connection. I could
hear the drives whirring in the caddy, but none of them showed up in my
Win7 file explorer. Would that be because the drives are old ATA drives? I
think one of them is SATA.

If that's the case, is there a caddy that can convert the ATA/SATA signal
into modern format that my Win7 PC can read?

Thanks...

Al

USB2 is OK - I get 20kBPS under 30 or 40 through the main
controllers. Fwiw - an ESATA and pin converters would better suit for
a spare USB cable, always available after setting up a dock;- simpler
just to have dangling ESATA cables available, then. Just a bit muddy,
sticky for all the interface adapters and stick-it pricing for
something so simple a cable-length limits and supply voltages. My
last two PATA drives shouldn't factor, as some MBs still have 1.44
interface, and I gave up on optics, DVD/BR, awhile ago. It'll be
stacks of HDs from here on. What we need is a good crash on HD
prices, more good 2T drives for $50;- might be neat to try and
substitute in SSDs, to fill that smaller PATA efficiency niche with
them.

 

[Paul]

Hi all,

I have several old hard drives from my older PC's Most are at least 8 years
old from when I had a PC running Win XP.

I woould like to access the data on them, but only have a Windows 7 PC now.

I tried loading the drives into an old caddy with a USB connection. I could
hear the drives whirring in the caddy, but none of them showed up in my
Win7 file explorer. Would that be because the drives are old ATA drives? I
think one of them is SATA.

If that's the case, is there a caddy that can convert the ATA/SATA signal
into modern format that my Win7 PC can read?

Thanks...

Al

Set the jumper to MASTER, on the pin block on the back
of the drive. There can be as many as four or five jumper
positions. Either the label on the drive, tells you
what to plug in, or you'll need to consult the manufacturer
web site.

In some cases, a drive is MASTER, when no jumpers are
plugged in. There should be a table of jumper settings,
on the drive. Usually the table is not complete though.
The complete table is on the web site.

A few adapters, support the full Master/Slave/Cable Select.
If I knew nothing about the adapter though, or didn't have
time to waste, I'd just set it to Master.

With one exception, there should be good backward
compatibility. Which is why I won't go blaming something
else as the problem, until you fix the jumper first.

A Western Digital (WD) drive can have

Master Only
Master with slave
Slave
Cable Select

It has two flavors of master, and the first one would seem
appropriate, as there is no second (Slave) drive present.

Paul

 

[Gabriel Knight]

There is a hard drive docking station out now that can take two hard drives
there are some on ebay here is one example:

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Twin-Dua...67?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_15&hash=item23282bee5b

some have a card reader in too.

GK

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Hi all,

I have several old hard drives from my older PC's Most are at least 8 years
old from when I had a PC running Win XP.

I woould like to access the data on them, but only have a Windows 7 PC now.

I tried loading the drives into an old caddy with a USB connection. I could
hear the drives whirring in the caddy, but none of them showed up in my
Win7 file explorer. Would that be because the drives are old ATA drives? I
think one of them is SATA.

If that's the case, is there a caddy that can convert the ATA/SATA signal
into modern format that my Win7 PC can read?

Win 7 has no problem with an external ATA drive. I've done it before.

 

[AL_n]

Win 7 has no problem with an external ATA drive. I've done it before.

Thank you all for the great help. Even with jumpers set to 'Master' the
drives still aren't shwoing up in File Explorer, so perhaps the drive
caddy's circuit board is caput. I will try connecting each of the drives
via an IDE cable or PATA cable going to the pins which I will hopefully
find on the motherboard tomorrow.

Al

 

[Loren Pechtel]

PS... I wonder if my caddy (Safecom SUSB2-F35CAF) failed to work because no
suitable driver is installed on my PC. Unfortunately, the driver on the CD
supplied with the caddy only works with Windows 98. I googled for a Win 7
driver for this caddy but failed to find one.

Does anyone know of a generic driver that might work?

I've never needed a driver for such things on XP and 7.

 

[Paul]

PS... I wonder if my caddy (Safecom SUSB2-F35CAF) failed to work because no
suitable driver is installed on my PC. Unfortunately, the driver on the CD
supplied with the caddy only works with Windows 98. I googled for a Win 7
driver for this caddy but failed to find one.

Does anyone know of a generic driver that might work?

Thanks again,

AL

If the device is USB Mass Storage (which it should be), the other
OSes already have drivers. Traditionally, a driver installation
is offered for Win98, because it doesn't have a full USB driver
setup as part of the OS. The driver package should *not* install
anything on later OSes.

Here is some info on your device. Adapter chip is PL-3507.
Allowed disk drive size is listed as 5GB to 250GB. Whereas
at least one sale site lists 750GB. In any case, it suggests
the PL-3507 doesn't have a problem at the 137GB capacity mark
(like my IDE enclosure using Oxsemi chip does).

http://web.archive.org/web/20050313...n/code/sub/category.asp?prdid=113&subcatid=12

Some thoughts:

1) Device uses four pin power at the back. Mechanically, that
tends to strain the power cable. Check for breaks in the
adapter cable. You can use a multimeter to verify the four pin
thing is delivering +5V and +12V. You might have GND, GND, +5V, +12V
as the four pins.

2) The Molex 4 pin connector inside the enclosure, can be poorly
fabricated. My current enclosure, the Molex is a compression fit
on the power cable, and there is an electrical intermittent in it.
To check for this, one test is to *listen* for hard drive rotation.
That tells you it's getting power on both rails. The "listen" test
is a substitute for using a multimeter.

3) Only use one interface at a time. The enclosure has both USB
and Firewire. Don't cable both of those to the computer at the
same time. I doubt this is your problem.

4) The IDE cable must be fully seated. A weakness of enclosures
for IDE, is inserting and removing the drive can be hard on
the connector. Sometimes, a pin gets bent over, and doesn't
go in the hole it is supposed to - and then that pin is not
making contact. The pins snap off if you try to straighten them
up, if they get smushed. The pins are too brittle for a 90 degree
correction. A tiny bend in the pin can be corrected, but requires
the user to realize the pin is not going in the hole. In the lab,
I usually smushed them. And then it was "repair time" to fix it.

In this example, a 750GB drive is connected to a PL-3507,
so it's unlikely to be a drive capacity issue. This design
is apparently bridged (PL_3507 plus IDE to SATA chip).

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop...and-serial-no-smart-info-avilable/td-p/478786

The "Listen" test is your best diagnostic at the moment.
If it's not spinning, it could be a power problem. It
was on my enclosure... Power is the most likely failure
mode. There are many cheap AC adapters out there.

As far as I know, chips like that don't tend to show in
Device Manager, unless the chip succeeds at talking to the
hard drive. If you connect an enclosure with no disk in it,
it should not show up. And that means we have less diagnostic
info to go on, when needed.

Paul

 

[AL_n]

I've never needed a driver for such things on XP and 7.

Thanks.. Looks like I need to get hold of an IDE cable then (or a new
caddy).

 

[AL_n]

If the device is USB Mass Storage (which it should be), the other
OSes already have drivers. Traditionally, a driver installation
is offered for Win98, because it doesn't have a full USB driver
setup as part of the OS. The driver package should *not* install
anything on later OSes.

Here is some info on your device. Adapter chip is PL-3507.
Allowed disk drive size is listed as 5GB to 250GB. Whereas
at least one sale site lists 750GB. In any case, it suggests
the PL-3507 doesn't have a problem at the 137GB capacity mark
(like my IDE enclosure using Oxsemi chip does).

http://web.archive.org/web/20050313152203/http://www.safecom.cn/code/su
b/category.asp?prdid=113&subcatid=12

Some thoughts:

1) Device uses four pin power at the back. Mechanically, that
tends to strain the power cable. Check for breaks in the
adapter cable. You can use a multimeter to verify the four pin
thing is delivering +5V and +12V. You might have GND, GND, +5V,
+12V as the four pins.

2) The Molex 4 pin connector inside the enclosure, can be poorly
fabricated. My current enclosure, the Molex is a compression fit
on the power cable, and there is an electrical intermittent in it.
To check for this, one test is to *listen* for hard drive
rotation. That tells you it's getting power on both rails. The
"listen" test is a substitute for using a multimeter.

3) Only use one interface at a time. The enclosure has both USB
and Firewire. Don't cable both of those to the computer at the
same time. I doubt this is your problem.

4) The IDE cable must be fully seated. A weakness of enclosures
for IDE, is inserting and removing the drive can be hard on
the connector. Sometimes, a pin gets bent over, and doesn't
go in the hole it is supposed to - and then that pin is not
making contact. The pins snap off if you try to straighten them
up, if they get smushed. The pins are too brittle for a 90 degree
correction. A tiny bend in the pin can be corrected, but requires
the user to realize the pin is not going in the hole. In the lab,
I usually smushed them. And then it was "repair time" to fix it.

In this example, a 750GB drive is connected to a PL-3507,
so it's unlikely to be a drive capacity issue. This design
is apparently bridged (PL_3507 plus IDE to SATA chip).

http://community.wdc.com/t5/Desktop-Portable-Drives/wd7500aads-strange-
firmware-and-serial-no-smart-info-avilable/td-p/478786

The "Listen" test is your best diagnostic at the moment.
If it's not spinning, it could be a power problem. It
was on my enclosure... Power is the most likely failure
mode. There are many cheap AC adapters out there.

As far as I know, chips like that don't tend to show in
Device Manager, unless the chip succeeds at talking to the
hard drive. If you connect an enclosure with no disk in it,
it should not show up. And that means we have less diagnostic
info to go on, when needed.

Paul

Wow - I much appreciate your detailed help. I can hear my drive spinning
in the enclosure, however it's just not showing up in file manager. I
have a vague recollection that the enclosure's firewire output stopped
working years ago. However, the other (USB) was working when I last used
it (probably witha Windows 98 PC). The USB lead it uses is a standard
Printer cable (standard USB plug at one end and a "house shaped"plug at
the other. I've tried a printer cable that I know is working (I borrowed
it from my working printer).

I've tried several 3.5" drives in the external enclosure, but have had no
success. I had the jumpers set to "master".

Unfortunately, the mobo on the PC has the new-type IDE leads with the
little plugs, and there isn't a spare DC supply lead in there either.

I could just buy another external drive enclosure off ebay for around 20
notes, but I think I will pass on that for now.

Al

 

[Greegor]

Unfortunately, the mobo on the PC has the new-type IDE leads with the

little plugs, and there isn't a spare DC supply lead in there either.

The "little plugs" you're talking about are SATA data lines.

To get data off your old drives you could temporarily
hook up an old power supply unit parked next to your system
and just use the one pigtail.

There are also adapter circuit boards that can make your old
IDE or EIDE drive work on a SATA port.
They're cheap and some don't work, but some do.

Another possibility would be to buy a card that
plugs into one of your computers expansion slots
and handles IDE (maybe 3 SATA and 1 IDE) drives.

Also a kit is sold on eBay which plugs into your
USB port and attaches to IDE or SATA just for
the purpose you described, just to move the data
from an old drive onto your new one.

There are variations but most such kits include
their own power supply unitto run the drive temporarily as well.
(I kinda like just using an old good PS from a computer though.)

I actually like using smaller drives as source drives
for drive cloning, but I use Win XP Pro where a fully
fledged set up working system with updates uses
a little more than 11 Gigabytes.

Older drives might be handy if you tinker with
even older computers or Linux which is smaller.

 

[Paul]

AL_n wrote:

Unfortunately, the mobo on the PC has the new-type IDE leads with the
little plugs, and there isn't a spare DC supply lead in there either.

You can buy "Y" power cables, to extend an existing power cable.
They come with a variety of connectors on the ends, so you have
to look carefully at the things you want to connect together,
before buying some.

http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/productimage/12-200-214-02.jpg

With the Y, you have one input connector (from the supply side)
and two output connectors (go to two loads). That allows
adding an additional hard drive.

Paul