I got an USB cable to hook up an internal hard drive to my laptop. It will not see the drive. I am trying to use it so I can retrieve the data and also use it to put my one drive stuff on it.
What can I do to troubleshoot this problem?
Is it a laptop (2.5") hard drive or a desktop (3.5") hard drive that you are trying to connect with the cable? If it is a 3.5" desktop hard drive, then you need a power supply/usb cable combination because USB by itself will not provide enough power to a 3.5" desktop hard drive.
Does the drive sound like it is powering up correctly? You should hear it spin up, make a couple of fairly loud clicking noises, then just keep whirring with more subtle clicking noises. What is bad is if the initial, louder clicking noises just keep repeating.
Is the drive showing up in disk management and you just need to assign drive letters to the partitions?
Disk Management - How to Post a Screenshot of Windows 10 General Tips Tutorials
If I may expand on the other reply, you have options. The first is the type of drive involved, PATA/Parallel ATA or SATA/Serial ATA. The SATA drives for Desktops and Notebooks use the same type/size physical connections to the motherboard. The PATA Desktop/3.5" use a 40/80-pin/conductor cable and 4-pin Molex power cable. The Notebook PATA has a different number of pins which include the power in the plug or socket. A USB cable in itself may not work but there's kits available to do what you need, latest I've gotten handles both PATA and SATA.
https://www.cyberguys.com/product-de...=13779&rH=1628
Note that both SATA and PATA are IDE [the circuit board on them] but PATA as a term came about after the SATA drive became popular so in older uses IDE refers to PATA drives.
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