Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler My turn for a HD failure....HELP!

Duplicate post deleted by me!

Sorry to be such a PITA.... But how do I determine if it's PATA or SATA?

It's most likely PATA, but I wouldn't swear to it. Crack the case first to find out. If it's got a big wide ribbon connector to the drive, it's PATA. If it's a svelte, thin cable, it's SATA.

I love it when Ken translates geekspeak to English. Seriously. Thanks.

Mark, you stay hydrated and keep us updated, okay?

A lot of external drives are just an internal with a fancy case around them. If power seems to be the issue, I'd have no hesitation in opening it up to see what's inside.

Alternatively, you can buy a 20 dollar hard drive recovery cable that has both a SATA and an old IDE drive connector connected to a USB input to another computer. They come with thier own power supply to power the drive.

I can't remember what they are properly called to google them but I used a buddies to retrieve data off a drive that wouldn't boot my PC anymore. Worked quiet well. They can be found on ebay under 20 bucks because many people buy them to use once and then don't have another immediate need for them.

Also, if you think you have power but the drive is just not spinning. There are people who swear by putting your hard drive in a ziplock bag and into the freezer for a few hours. I think it may be an urban myth but like all urban legends, I know someone who did it and it worked.

Murph:

Thanks for the reply!

As things stand at the moment, I haven't cracked open the case as of yet, but I'm planning on doing so and likely will install the drive as an "internal" to offload it. I'm not sure if I'll keep it as an internal, or maybe buy a Drobo and install it as well as some of the other drives that are sitting around unused.

It's been years since I installed a HD...are there pin settings/dip switches to be concerned with, or would any of those already be set correctly anyway?

SATA drives usually have no pins or dip switches. Even if it's an older ATA drive where you had to set it to "Slave" vs. "Master" , it would already have been set to "slave" mode because it was intended to be used as a supplementary drive anyways. Any other settings should not be changed either.

Once you open it up, you will almost assuredly find an a plain old, internal hard drive hooked to nothing more than a power supply an on/off button and maybe some very minor circuitry. The drive itself should have two cables. The power supply cable should be easy enough to identify, leaving the data cable.

If it's the older ATA style drive, it will be a large flat ribbon cable. If that is the case, there is going to be pins or dip switches but as mentioned above, you shouldn't need to change anything. If you find a small plastic pin connector rattling freely around in there, you also found your problem.

If it's a much smaller ended, round cable it is PATA and there is nothing to change as they are pretty much plug and play.

The only challenge you will have is maybe matching the cable to your PC. Power should be easy as your PC probably has extra power cables of different size ends. However, most newer PCs are SATA and don't have anywhere to hook up the older style drives and vice versa if older.

For your data cable to the PC, the older ATA's usually have an extra connector wired in parallel to the existing cable.

The SATA drives usually plug into internal USB ports inside the PC itself. Just trace out the existing hard drives cable to find the extra port. You may need to buy another cable though as the port is probably sitting empty. For either technology, the one in the external drive will likely be too short to be useful and may not be removable.


Hope this helps. Feel free to ask more questions once you get deeper into it. I expect to see some nice photos of the whole project.

Good post, Murph--but I have a couple of corrections.

If the drive is PATA (big wide cable), it's more likely to be set to Cable Select or Master, since on the little teeny internal bus of hte USB converter board, it's a Master, not a slave. The drive should have a little diagram telling you what jumper need to go where for which operation.

4th paragraph, you mean SATA.

6th paragraph, they hook up to SATA ports, not USB. Different protocol.

Sorry for the nitpicking, but hey, I'm a pedant.

No apologies needed. You are absolutely correct. I wrote it much to quickly and I did mix up my acronyms a few times. Thanks for the help. I didn't remember typing USB but it was on my mind from the external cable recover device I mentioned earlier. I knew they were different which is why I mentioned tracing them down to find them. Oh well.

I'll admit that the slave master thing was a surprise though. The one I opened up was a Maxtor set to slave so I assumed they all would be similar as it made sense being a secondary drive. However, I suppose that would be dependent on the circuitry.

If that's the case, you will indeed need to double check the jumpers/switches. If it's set to master, you will need to set to slave. Most are labeled right on the drive but you might have to find some online documentation on the Master vs. different slave settings.

Good catch!
Glad you caught my errors before he got confused.

...is not a cute kid.

It's Pain-In-The-A** me with Pata/Sata situation!

OK....here's my drive, newly birthed from it's case:


So, that's got a wide-ribbon connector, making it PATA, right?

Well, my Dell looks like it's set up for SATA only:


(Does the "S" in SATA mean Serial?)

So, I assume I'm back to Newegg's site to find a PATA external case?