I have a Hitachi DK23CA-20 drive which has become unreadable. I'm computer literate but I don't have enough technical knowledge to work out what is the problem. I have removed the drive from the laptop and placed it in a USB enclosure.

The drive spins up and sounds normal - no clicks or anything worrying.

When I plug in the HD to the USB port it is recognised as a USB Mass Storage Device, but no drive appears in My Computer.

Computer Management>Disk Management does not see the physical drive.

Stellar Phoenix sees the physical drive but is not able to find any logical drives. If I right-click the physical drive and choose Disk/Drive Preview, all the bytes appear as 00.

If I select Refresh Drive List I can hear the drive being 'accessed'.

There is no reason why this drive should have been zeroed, so I cannot believe that the entire disk surface is actually zeroed. I suspect that there is a physical fault which is causing this, but I don't have enough knowledge to be sure.

Can anyone help? The laptop is old, and the data on the drive is worthwhile but not essential, so I don't want to pay for data recovery, but I'm prepared to put in a bit of time to try to recover it. But I don't want to dive in and go through the frustrations of trying to find my way through software which is hard going unless I know I'm going in the right direction. I've searched the internet but I can't find a step-by-step hard drive diagnosis which might help me.

Best regards

Patrick Cunningham

Simple : maybe the disk has a problem. As the data is not worth and you don't want to spend a single dime, the only thing you can do is to check for a partition problem, search again the internet and (better) figure out exactly if it's a logical or physical problem. For the logical problem, as you don't want to spend, search for some free program that can help, use THEIR help if possible or the program documentation. Experiment, at your own risk. You are on your own.



Learning, doing and achieving results have frustration as side effect. WE KNOW.

Rgds.

ATA password?