"Device Not Ready" when attempting to connecting an old (DOS) hard drive to windows 7

Posted by Christopher Vigliotti on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Christopher Vigliotti
Published on 2012-01-21T19:25:42Z Indexed on 2012/06/11 16:42 UTC
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Windows

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hard-drive

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ms-dos

I have an old Western Digital Caviar 2540 hard drive that I am attempting to connect to a Windows 7 machine by using a Bytecc BT-300 USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA Adapter. I'm connecting things in the right order (power, then sata, then usb) and the jumper settings on the drive are at present set to slave, but am still having an issue.

I am recieving a message that the drive is not initialized. When I go into Computer Management I can see the drive (as "Disk 5, Unknown, Not Initialized"), but when I attempt to initialize it or right-click and select "Offline" It tells me that "the device is not ready". Is there something that I can to to get around this, connect the drive and copy the data that I need off of this drive? Is there a third party tool available that I can use?

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