How to get old Hard drives to work again?

[Bbc84]

Well I have this old Maxtor 20GB drive (the extra thick one) Its as thick as my 120GB WD drive. the new Maxtor 20GB are real thin.

Anyways i let that 20GB drive sit in the computer with no power going to it or IDE cable connected. I tried connecting it back today to try to get some of my old saved files off of it and found it to be dead.

XP wont recognize it anymore and when boot up it recognizes its a FAT32 formated drive but it wants to scan it for error and after it does that it says error writing to log file then it takes close to 5 min to boot into Win XP and everything LAGS I couldnt even get into My computer it took too long, so i shut off the computer and took off the drive and XP restarted right away and everything was normal.

So i know something is wrong with that drive. any ideas? the drive i would say is I wanna say atleast 3-4yrs old.

Anything I can do? Since I cant really get it to boot up and keep the system stable i cant really even format it, and i dont really want to format it since i got 20GB worth of my files in there as backup.

 

[Gravity]

You can try a data recovery service. They are pretty expensive but they work. If that was your primary drive at one time you might try disconnecting your new drive and booting to the old one and then copy the files to floppy or cd. Finally, let me suggest that you could get an external drive enclosure and use the drive as a usb 2.0 or firewire drive, I've had very good success getting those old drives to work in that way. Connect it after your system is running and it should recognize it as a mass storage device. Copy to your heart's conent if that works.

Good luck,

 

[jmagg]

Make sure the old drive is set to slave or cable select, and/ or try it in the secondary controller.

 

[Bbc84]

Maybe Ill try the enclosure thing. Dont they make USB 2 and Fire Wire? I got both of those kinds of ports which one is faster? Ive been thinking of getting one of those enclosures considering i have 4HD and can only use 2 at a time.