External Hard Drive not recognized

Within the past couple weeks, my external hard drive stopped being recognized by my computer. It's a 160gb Seagate internal hard drive in a hard drive enclosure case. It worked fine on my computer up until a couple weeks ago. I took the hard drive to a friend's, and when I hooked it up to mine a week later, it didn't work. The computer recognizes that the drive's attached (makes sound when plugged in/unplugged, and even says it installs and is ready to use. Please help!

I've been having similar problems with mine as well. Do you have info in that hard drive that you need?? If so then I would recommend that you take it out of the enclosure and hook it up to the inside of a desktop as a slave drive. For some reason that seemed to work for mine. This way you can get the info from your external hard drive.

After saving your info I would try formating the drive and hooking it back up to your enclosure kit. However, I no longer trust mine with my data.

Sounds almost like there's something wrong with the drive itself... It's not too uncommon for external drives to die, but the actual controller still works. Would it be too hard to remove the drive from the enclosure and use it internally?

For me I hv no problem to hook on any PC it still works well. Maybe the PCBA part is having problem that is located inside the HDD enclosure, maybe you can check and see. Usually the PCB is very loose once you bend a little bit than it will not work well.

What exactly is the PCBA part? Sorry, not familiar with hardware technicalities.



In regard to the other comments, yeah I could hook it up internally. I just worry about overheating the drive. My case holds the two drives pretty close together. I was hoping there was a simple solution because i didn't want to open my computer up. *sigh* *as he unscrews the casing* Well here we go.

I think evo mean "PCB", the USB to IDE controller inside the enclosure. Basically the opposite of what I was saying Though I have seen some controllers go bad, but they typically aren't "found" by Windows, or they randomly disconnect.

As for heat, honestly I'd worry more about the enclosure getting hot than the drive inside the computer... Especially some of these enclosures really get toasty!