Recovering USB hard drive...
 

I have a USB hard drive that carries some old laptop and work files. It also has some photos from Asia that we thought were lost. I plugged it into my computer, and the green power light comes on, but the drive doesn't appear in my directory. I've tried it on three different computers, and the same thing happens.

Any thoughts?

Right click on My Computer and select Manage. Click on Disk Management. Does it come up? If not, it may not be the drive itself, but the USB carrier. If it does, try something like Stellar Phoenix to recover the data.

I had a similar problem and tried everything. I then busted open the case and reinstalled the drive in another enclosure. It worked perfectly.

I had a similar problem and tried everything. I then busted open the case and reinstalled the drive in another enclosure. It worked perfectly.

I actually have a newer drive that I want to put the data on, since this drive is about 4 years old and I have lugged it around the world several times. I was concerned about it konking out on me, and did so before I could do the data transfer.

Update
 

I had our company IT monkey look at it. He disconnected the drive from the case and directly hooked it up as a slave on a desktop PC. The files showed up just fine. So....it appears that the cable or hard drive-to-ISB card is messed up. That's an easy fix. :)

Yeah, those interface cards (IDE-USB) often use rather cheap components. If one fails, the first thing (after software check) to try is a new enclosure or just hook it up and set jumper to slave