Need help with hard drive adapter of 2.5" to 3.5"

[Drakula]

Hi,

I have gotten an hard drive adapter that allows me to connect a 2.5" hard drive to normal desktop, almost exactly to the one on this site for the purpose of data recovery. The thing is that the laptop hard drive works with my laptop, I checked, but when I used the adapter trying to connect to the desktop, the desktop does not recognize the hard drive at all. The hard drive does not seem to power up at all. Can someone help me debug this? I am not sure if it is the problem with adapter, where some pin should be connected to power, but it is not. Or the hard drive itself, but it seems to work when connect back to laptop. Any support helps, because it is essential to recover some data on the hard drive.:frown:

By the way, the 2.5" hard drive is from a Compaq Presario laptop, I am not sure if that information is needed or not.

Thanks.

 

[amdskip]

I have that same adapter and it has worked flawlessly. Make sure you line up pin 1 to pin 1 and go from there.

 

[Drakula]

Originally posted by: amdskip
I have that same adapter and it has worked flawlessly. Make sure you line up pin 1 to pin 1 and go from there.

I did, but somehow it does not work. The hard drive does not seem to power up, that or somehow the desktop does not recognize the 2.5" hard drive. I saw how the pins were converted, it is on a small PCB. Would you happen to have picture of the PCB from yours? Maybe I can try to figure out what is wrong from there.

 

[Googer]

Check the jumpers.

Some of these converter boards have jumper settings and specialized power connectors.

 

[Drakula]

Originally posted by: Googer
Check the jumpers.

Some of these converter boards have jumper settings and specialized power connectors.

Well, the thing is that there are 41 pins on the adapter on the 3.5" side, two of them connect to a normal hard drive connector, except the connector consists of two pins instead of four pins. And the other 39 pins are for the normal IDE connector. Therefore, there is no specialized power connector nor jumpers to configure. As for the hard drive, I leave it so no jumpers are used, and according to Toshiba's site, Toshiba is the maker of the hard drive that I am trying to connect to desktop, that makes it master. But even if I configure it to cable select, still not working. Currently, it seems that the hard drive does not power up at all. That is what gets me stumped. It seems straight forward, but it does not work.

I could try to get pictures of the small PCB that the adapter have, if anyone think that might help, currently, the problem might be pins are connected wrong or not connected.:frown:

 

[Googer]

Compusa sells one that i know works.

 

[Googer]

What size is the HDD and How old is it?

 

[redbeard1]

This link is to my favorite converter. I have two of them at home. I've never had problems with it.

Corpsys

That said, we have the same one you do, at work. It has generally worked ok the few times I've used it. Though recently when I was trying to ghost two laptop drives at the same time I had some troubles. In the desktop system I was using, I tried to get both drives to work together on the secondary port. I tried various combinations but was not able to find a way to have both drives hooked and working up at the same time. I put both drives in a different system on the primary port and was able to get them to work together. I was using one of mine from home and the one like yours from work.

I know in the past I've had OEM laptop drives not work on the secondary ide channel. They were limited to only working on the primary ide. I suppose it is some sort of cost savings to not program it for use on the secondary port. In what I described about the two drives, they were out of a HP/Compaq. The jumper settings on the drive were covered by their OEM part number stickers. The old one was a Toshiba. I ended up going to Toshiba's site to get the jumper settings, as the drive I was working on was in warranty, and I did not want to rip the original stickers off. I suppose it's possible also that the adapter you have could have some sort of issue where it won't work on the secondary port the way you want it to.

 

[Drakula]

Originally posted by: Googer
What size is the HDD and How old is it?

The hard drive size is 30GB and I would say it is about two year and three months old, maybe a little older, because I bought my laptop in September of 2002, and the drive is the original one comes with it, I never had to repair it nor change it to different one before. The product number is MK3018GAP from Toshiba, the specification sheet of it can only be found by search, they do not list it on the support part of the site for some reason, probably too old for them.

Originally posted by: redbeard1
This link is to my favorite converter. I have two of them at home. I've never had problems with it.

Corpsys

That said, we have the same one you do, at work. It has generally worked ok the few times I've used it. Though recently when I was trying to ghost two laptop drives at the same time I had some troubles. In the desktop system I was using, I tried to get both drives to work together on the secondary port. I tried various combinations but was not able to find a way to have both drives hooked and working up at the same time. I put both drives in a different system on the primary port and was able to get them to work together. I was using one of mine from home and the one like yours from work.

I know in the past I've had OEM laptop drives not work on the secondary ide channel. They were limited to only working on the primary ide. I suppose it is some sort of cost savings to not program it for use on the secondary port. In what I described about the two drives, they were out of a HP/Compaq. The jumper settings on the drive were covered by their OEM part number stickers. The old one was a Toshiba. I ended up going to Toshiba's site to get the jumper settings, as the drive I was working on was in warranty, and I did not want to rip the original stickers off. I suppose it's possible also that the adapter you have could have some sort of issue where it won't work on the secondary port the way you want it to.

I saw that one, looks better because they do not have wires for the power connector. Anyway, at first, I tried to hook it to the second IDE, but did not work. Then I tried to hook it to the primary IDE, but did not work either. The setting was at master, according to the Toshiba's document. I tried to set the jumpers, so the drive would be at cable select, but does not work either. I know that my 2.5" hard drive lack of pin 20, but it seems sort of standard. There was something that the Toshiba's site revealed about pin 28, which relates to jumper setting, but I am not sure if that could be the problem. Could they (Compaq) have lock the drive somehow so only their computer can recognize it?

Thanks guys. I will try to use the adapter on another desktop to see if the problem still occur and will post result later.

 

[Drakula]

I tried to use another lower end desktop, one that needs an ATA card to handle 40GB of hard drive, so probably have 32GB limit, in any case, I tried to plug the 2.5" hard drive to the ATA card, but the system just stuck boot up screen.

 

[Drakula]

Well, currently, problem solved. I went to Fry's and gotten an USB 2.5" drive enclosure, so now the desktop PC can read the 2.5" hard drive. So, it is the adapter's problem. I would still like to try to get the adapter to work though, because when I run PC Inspector, it gave me some weird error, so that means the program does not support USB enclosure.:frown:

 

[Googer]

Why are you trying to run PC Inspector? Did you loose something? There are other software programs out there that can do the same thing and that work with other interfaces besides the usual suspects: SCSI, IDE, and SATA. Try something differant, and if all else fails Go to GRC.Com and Get your self a copy of SPIN-RITE. Nothing works better, Guarenteed!


Do not get me wrong here PC Inspector is great and I have no Probelms with it, but sometimes it the wrong tool for the job.

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: Googer
Check the jumpers.

Some of these converter boards have jumper settings and specialized power connectors.

[*]What I meant by that was to check the jumpers on the 44pin adapter card. Many Adapeters have them.
And checking HDD Master/Slave configureation does not hurt either. Just make sure when using cable select that both drives have the CS option enabled and the bios is setup for it.
[*]Having one drive setup for MASTER/SLAVE AND ANOTHER WITH CS WILL CAUSE PROBLEMS

 

[Drakula]

Originally posted by: Googer
Why are you trying to run PC Inspector? Did you loose something? There are other software programs out there that can do the same thing and that work with other interfaces besides the usual suspects: SCSI, IDE, and SATA. Try something differant, and if all else fails Go to GRC.Com and Get your self a copy of SPIN-RITE. Nothing works better, Guarenteed!


Do not get me wrong here PC Inspector is great and I have no Probelms with it, but sometimes it the wrong tool for the job.

Well, I lost lot of data due to some program's weird uninstallation as I mentioned in my previous thread in this part of the forum, here. So I am trying to recover essential data in my hard drive. That is why I got the adapter in the first place. How well does SPIN-RITE work with deleted data, do you know? I have not heard of the product before, possibily being overshadow by Ontrack, so I am unsure. I have used PC Inspector before, in my previous thread, so I thought I would give it a try.

Originally posted by: Googer

Originally posted by: Googer
Check the jumpers.

Some of these converter boards have jumper settings and specialized power connectors.

[*]What I meant by that was to check the jumpers on the 44pin adapter card. Many Adapeters have them.
And checking HDD Master/Slave configureation does not hurt either. Just make sure when using cable select that both drives have the CS option enabled and the bios is setup for it.
[*]Having one drive setup for MASTER/SLAVE AND ANOTHER WITH CS WILL CAUSE PROBLEMS

Yea, I know what you meant by the jumpers, and truthfully, there was no jumper to adjust on the adapter. The adapter has 42 pins, two power connector and 40 for the IDE connector. I have checked the hard drive configuration as well too. Right now, I know the adapter is not working, but since I got the USB enclosure at the moment, recovery of data is more important.

 

[Googer]

Should'nt it have 44 pins, I believe it uses 4 pins to power the drive. Please Correct me if i am wrong here. It has 2 for Positve and 2 for negative. Using two 5v pins lessens the load on the thin cable (i.e.twice the conductivity). Although i could be wrong here.

Check your bios configuration, Its the reason i asked how old your drive was. I had the idea that you needed
to set up a manual CHS* setup (ususaly for drive a 528mb drive or less, but sometimes bigger drives)

*CHS- Cylanders, Heads, and Sectors


Corrected for spelling and grammer.

 

[Drakula]

Originally posted by: Googer
Should'nt it have 44 pins, I believe it uses 4 pins to power the drive. Please Correct me if i am wrong here. It has 2 for Positve and 2 for negative. Using two pins for 5v lessens the load on the thin cable. Althogh i could be wrong here.

Check your bios configuration, Its the reason i asked how old your drive was. I had the idea that you needed
to set up a manual CHS* setup (ususaly for drive 528mb or less, but sometimes bigger drives)

*CHS- Cylanders, Heads, and Sectors

Yeah, I know about the CHS configuration, but I remember I only had to adjust those for some dying drives that does not get correctly recognized by the BIOS, but this is not really the case, since my laptop recognize it correctly and the drive was not really dying, only data was erased.

It is 44 pins, but the adapter eliminate pins 41 and 42 by design. My adapter looks the same as the one from this site, link, you can see that two pins besides the power connector are gone. I know those two pins that are gone are 5V, but not sure why they were eliminated from design. I think they connect the 5V part of the connector interally to those pins. Not too sure, but my suspicion is that the assignment of those four pins are not correct and that is the reason why the adapter is not working. I will try to get the picture of the PCB for you guys to see, then maybe you can spot the problem for me.

 

[Googer]

You do seem very knowledgeable. I was pretty sure you knew about CHS, but even the best of us look over the littlest things.

What is suspect is going one here and I have seen this several times before, is your drive is not reciving enough current. Try another adapeter. Even if this 42pin adapter is a "KNOW GOOD" unit, it's lack of 2 pins may make it incompatable with your hard drives schmatics. Since the two missing power connections may be the ones that spin the motor or power the electronics. Some HDD's use shared power lines for the motor and electronics so a 42 pin would work in that situatuion but not the other way around. Try find another adapter with 44pins for $5-10 or look on ebay.

Merry Christmas!
PS please feel free to correct any mistakes that i may make.

 

[Drakula]

Originally posted by: Googer
You do seem very knowledgeable. I was pretty sure you knew about CHS, but even the best of us look over the littlest things.

What is suspect is going one here and I have seen this several times before, is your drive is not reciving enough current. Try another adapeter. Even if this 42pin adapter is a "KNOW GOOD" unit, it's lack of 2 pins may make it incompatable with your hard drives schmatics. Since the two missing power connections may be the ones that spin the motor or power the electronics. Some HDD's use shared power lines for the motor and electronics so a 42 pin would work in that situatuion but not the other way around. Try find another adapter with 44pins for $5-10 or look on ebay.

Merry Christmas!
PS please feel free to correct any mistakes that i may make.

Yea, I know what you meant. When writing programs for my class assignments, I would forget to put in semicolons even though I have done it a lot of times. In this case, I was recently reminded what CHS was stand for due to dealing with an old hard drive.

You make a good point about the current and the pins. But I am not sure if it is possible to measure the current used for the hard drive. As for the pins, I was tempted attach a wire to 5V to the pin that power the motor, or the 5V logic, I forgot which one. But I was not sure if that will make the adapter work with my hard drive or end up frying it.

I do not think you made any mistakes, it is just not easy to try to diagnose hardware, so all possibility have to be taken into account.

Merry Christmas to you too. And thanks for the effort of helping.