I have 3 hard drives right now that have been confusing the hell out of me. The first 2 are a pair of 80 Gig laptop IDE hard drives that were raided (raid 0) in my alienware craptop. The drives are fine (I think) the laptop isn’t recognizing any hardware; I’m just trying to figure out if there is a way I can hook them up to a desktop to rescue the data.
The 3rd is a Seagate 400 Gig IDE. It was in an external enclosure being used to store my vids and comics around 3 thousand ( I really don’t want to have to hunt that down again.)
One day I turned it on and the hard drive activity light just started to blink, no response I’m thinking I’m going to try and plug it directly into my computer tonight but just wondering if you guys have any idea. I tried in a different enclosure and it recognized it as an unformatted drive. I think the second enclosure couldn’t handle the drive size.
The drive dose spin up in the second enclosure so I’m hoping its ok. I originally had it in a metal gear box but I don’t think I’m going that rout ever again; any suggestions for a replacement.
Thanks guys I appreciate the help.

Are you getting any S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic error messages during boot?

Quote: Originally Posted by Jobistober Are you getting any S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic error messages during boot?

it just keeps giving me the ..........Can't find Operation System. Came to conclusion that its not recognizing the hard drives and alienware has been no help at all so I've given up on it and the only thing left to do is introduce it to my shot gun. I was curious about a cable that would allow me to hook thease up to a sata raid controller or something.

Well, I have an IDE to USB adapter for harddrives... it even has an adapter for laptop harddrives. So you're not completely out of options. One of these adapters can be had for less than 10 bucks on eBay. I would at least try and get them connected to a known working computer, get them to be recognized by the system, and perform some basic diagnostics like chkdsk or some other diagnostics direct from the manufacturers before blowing them away with buck-shot.

OK sound good do you know if theirs an application that can handle 2 usb devices in a raid function, and as far a distroying the machine i wouldn't shoot the hard drives they seem to be the only working part which is scarry as this is esentualy a new laptop.

I forgot that the two 80's are in a RAID0... that complicates things. As far as a USB RAID controller, I've never heard of such a thing. But you could still get a couple adapters for the laptop harddrives so that you could plug them into an IDE or SATA raid controller and get the data off them that way.

Because of the fact that these are laptop harddrives in a RAID0 (which this is the first time I've heard of such a thing being implemented) makes this quite complicated. It'll be a long, drawn out process to get them to work in a desktop-PC, but whether or not it's worth your time and money is entirely up to how important the data is to you.

I'd say the data isn't that crucial, as its been about six months since i got the machine to boot. I would like to try at least. One of the things i am most concerned about functioning is, the raid controalers. I don't know if it will only work if i have the identical raid controler and/or drivers.
I have a brand new striker extream its for a computer that currently is missing the ram, PSU, GPU, and CPU, So i have a mobo lying around that can handle raid, I also think my current computer also supports raid, and i have a raid card thats not in a machine.