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External Hard Drive recognized as USB to ATA/ATAPI bridge

orkapie Posted messages 2 Status Member -  
 Scorpius -
Hello,

I have an ASSUS Notebook laptop, running Windows 7, and an external hard drive II FREECOM that was working well until a few days ago. It powers on, hums, but doesn't open; the light is not green but orange.

Today, the external hard drive is recognized as USB to ATA/ATAPI bridge.

In disk management, it appears as: disk 1, unknown, not initialized, unallocated.

I plugged it into other computers, and I got the same result.
I don’t want to format it because I would then lose all my documents.

I spent hours on forums reading the solutions provided, but none of the ones I tried worked.

A little help would be greatly appreciated!!!
Thank you in advance.

Configuration: Windows 7 / Firefox 16.0

2 answers

  1. Scorpius
     
    The first thing to do is to test the hardware separately.
    In principle, it’s not the computer since the problem occurs on others (how many? Which operating systems?)
    Does the disk work on its own (mounted internally)?
    Does the case have the same issue with other disks?
    0
  2. fabul Posted messages 42113 Registration date   Status Moderator Last intervention   6 060
     
    Hi,

    The main problem is that it's like uninitialized...

    And to initialize a disk, you don't go through USB, you have to connect it internally...

    Then, preferably, it should have a format (formatted)...

    By performing a "quick" format so as not to overwrite the hidden data...

    And try to recover the data with software like Recuva...

    If it was previously NTFS (very likely), it should be reformatted to NTFS to recover with Recuva...

    Recover to another disk to avoid overwriting...

    Do you see where you’re going?
    -1
    1. orkapie Posted messages 2 Status Member
       
      Thank you
      I'll try that tomorrow and keep you posted.
      0