Can't view contents of old IDE drives that have been sitting around. (Solved)

[fuzzybabybunny]

I've got multiple old (40GB - 160GB) IDE hard drives that have been sitting around for probably 10+ years. The last time I used them they were all working. They've simply been in storage all these years.

I bought an IDE/SATA to USB 3.0 adapter so that I can pull data from the drives before I recycle them. I figured that it would be straightforward - put the jumpers into Master, hook up to USB adapter, and open the drive in Windows Explorer.

Well... it doesn't show in My Computer and Disk Management shows "unallocated" for the disk.

What's going on? All the drives were healthy last time I used them. The same thing has happened on 4 different drives. I'm running Windows 10 and they were probably running either XP or Vista back in the day.

 

[Elixer]

Sounds like the USB adapter is broken. Which one are you using?
If you have a old machine around that has IDE ports, that would be the best test to see if it is broken...

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Wow. I booted up into Linux (ElementaryOS) and all the drives are totally viewable and working fine.

I'm using the Sabrent USB-DSC9.

They're definitely not Linux filesystems either.

 

[Elixer]

Linux actually has good support for both FAT32 & NTFS these days.
Glad you got access to your files!