I took the HD out of my laptop and put it in a case and added it to my Media Center PC thru one of the USB 2 connections, the problem is that the drive is running, DISK MANAGEMENT shows it as mass storage 5, but I can't find it (i.e. no icon when I go to My Computer). Anyone have a clue?

Well does it say if it is formatted or not? Were you running Goback software on the laptop? Goback keeps a drive from being seen properly.... Also some older disk manager software did as well. Another possibility is the drive password protected? or compressed?

The LT did have GOBACK and I do not want to FORMAT and loose all the info: Thanks Roadwarrior

Will it boot if you put it back in the old computer? If so you can uninstall goback... ( I think first you have to press spacebar on boot and disable it) then you should be able to see the drive

The LT went bad that is why I am trying to read files with a external case to hold the LT hard drive.

Well in that case I can see two possible "solutions", You could get a copy of go back to install on your desktop and hope it can recognize the drive properly or you could try a program called getdataback from this site.


http://www.runtime.org/

you will need to know if it is ntfs or fat there are seperate versions of getdataback depending on the partitions. The program can be downloaded and will run and test the drive and tell you what can be recovered, BEFORE you pay for it. That way you can see if it is worth buying..... there are other data recovery programs out there that might work as well.... I have used getdataback to recover a messed up goback partition before so I know it can get some of it back at least.... you could try pcinspector which is free but I can tell you if it will work with goback for sure.... just do a google search for pcinspector if you want to try it.

Remember you will need space enough for possibly the whole drive size on another hard drive ( could be your boot drive ) to transfer all the files to

good luck....