External HDD Connected via SATA to USB Freezes Computer

[abhishekUpmanyu]

Hi, this is my first post to the forum!

I recently salvaged an old SATA HDD from my 10 year old laptop, the disk is Western Digital WD5000LPVT 500GB.
I wanted to recover data from it and use it as an external drive, so I bought an enclosure that had SATA to USB 3.0

But when I connect it to my laptop, it shows 4 partitions:
-> System Reserved: It shows some bootmgr files
-> 3 other partition letters show up but it doesn't show the size and if I try to open those the explorer freezes indefinitely.

I even tried using partition manager, but it doesn't load up as long as the HDD is connected.
The operating systems I tried to connect the disk to are Windows 11 and Ubuntu.

I'm pretty sure the hard-disk is fine speaking hardware-wise.
It's from an old laptop and I'm new to this, I'd appreciate any help!

[WebClaw]

If you query a sector using a software tool like MHDD you'll most likely see the HDD going BSY ("busy") and staying in that state.
SMART will show reallocation and ultra-crc warnings / errors.

Best to buy a new drive. If you need the data seek DR; it's a super common issue. You'll need to edit FW modules to get the data recovered.

[Lardman]

Possibly - but it's always worth trying a quick clone with hddsuperclone just in case, if the copy speed is terrible stop.