Was trying to copy data off an old 40GB IDE I had in a Dell Inspiron 4150.

Hadn't powered up the laptop in years, got it up and running but half the keys on the keyboard didn't work so I couldn't even enter the password for my user account in Windows XP Pro.

Pulled the HDD and plugged it into a Startech dock I have connected to my Dell M4400 via USB 3.0.

I was able to access the HDD just fine however it would not give me permission to access many of the files.

So I went in to redo all the permissions. I got errors for maybe two or three of the files but other than that it seemed like it was going well, changing ownership to cover all current administrator accounts on my machine.

After it was done, though, the HDD disappeared from Windows 7.

I powered everything down and back up again. It detects the hard drive but everything says 0 bytes and it says I need to format it first before I can use it.

Did I kill it redoing the permissions? Or did it just die in the process, though I did nothing wrong, just because it is old and was sitting so long?

If anyone has any advice on how to try and recover the data, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks!

Hello reyxlp,

if there is no strange sounds from drive, you can try with MiniTool Data Recovery software. Select Damaged partition recovery and try with open od full scan.

You can also use ddrescue

If data are valuable for you, then stop any activity and find Professional data recovery company near you