External Hard Drive Help!

[pkilway01]

I had an old laptop hard drive laying around so I picked up a Vantec Nexstar SX to house it and use as a backup drive.

I had a ton of files that I wanted to backup from my laptop (it was acting funny). I plugged the drive in after placing it in the housing, formatted it and backed up my important files.

Now after a few weeks, my laptop isn't working. Thank the LORD I backed up right? But now I'm getting a weird error when I have the external attached to my desktop pc.

The error I get is that I don't have rights to access the files, or that the drive is full. :shocked:? What? So now I have no laptop (not working) and the files which I backed up I can't access for some reason.

Both my laptop (well it DID run) and desktop run Windows XP Pro with all updates. The hard drive was reformatted as NTFS.

Can anyone help me out?

 

[Old Hippie]

Change permissions?

 

[pkilway01]

Originally posted by: Old Hippie
Change permissions?

I will try that when I get home tonight.

 

[pkilway01]

I tried everything in that thread 5-6 times. Still no luck. Looks like I'll have to reformat the thing and just loose the data in order to use it again!

:frown:

 

[mrblotto]

Were you using file encryption on your laptop?

 

[montag451]

Wait - before you format:

Have you got Partition Manager - might trash your files, or might not!
Change the drive to FAT32, that will also strip all permissions.

I can't see any other easy way to convert.

 

[TemjinGold]

Have you tried taking the drive OUT of the enclosure and installing it into your desktop as another internal hard drive? This might allow you to access your files.

 

[pkilway01]

Ok, I'll answer in order.

1) I don't think I was usign file encryption on my laptop - not sure how to enable encryption or how to turn it off.

2) I don't have Partition Manager to convert the drive to FAT32. On someone else's recommendation I tried copying a few files to a thumb drive which was a FAT32 drive. No go there.

3) Do laptop hard drives fit a normal IDE cable? Remember the drive in the enclosure is an old 2.5" 5,000 rpm laptop hard drive.

Any other ideas?

 

[Old Hippie]

2) I don't have Partition Manager to convert the drive to FAT32. On someone else's recommendation I tried copying a few files to a thumb drive which was a FAT32 drive. No go there.

Copying the files to a FAT32 partition isn't gonna change anything. The suggestion was probably to change the file system to FAT32.

Do laptop hard drives fit a normal IDE cable?

No. you will have to buy a 2.5 to 3.5 IDE converter.

Good Luck!