Ok, long story short, my external HDD case went. Tried a new case and it doesn't power the HDD. Ran power from my desktop, and then connected it thru the cases USB. My computer detects the HDD but doesn't show in any window but device manager. Any type of data recovery app reports that my 120gig HDD is a 2Tb drive?!?!?! It also has read erors at every sector. Now, my only option left was installing the official Wester Digital tools, which offers to install the HDD drivers, but needs to reformat my HDD since the file system is unknown. Which is no big deal since as long as i don't write new data to the HDD, i should be able to recover something. Now, I'm trying to connect this HDD to my desktop as a slave HDD,(much easier to work with) but my computer assigns it an irq setting of 15, which is in use by my "Network Bus Enumerator" and my "PCI to USB Controller". But when I connect my slave maxtor HDD, it runs fine and everything. Is it because this is a external HDD, trying to use standard IDE setings? But the big question is.... Will connecting the HDD to an IDE to SATA adapter, allow the system to mount and assign proper irq resources? Plus, what would you guys do if you had an external drive, with 9 years of your kids memories on it, to recover it?
Long story short. It looks as if you have done all of the right things, but if you tried a known good enclosure and you can't see the drive, it looks like it might be the drive.
"Is it because this is a external HDD, trying to use standard IDE setings? "
Once you deinstall the drive from the external case, it is a hard drive just like any other hard drive. You should be able to jumper it as a slave and connected it to any IDE chain in your PC. If you can see the drive it pretty much confirms that there is something wrong with the drive.
You can get an IDE/SATA controller and it should see the drive just like any normal drive if the drive is still OK.
If you have 2 IDE controllers in your PC, you can try this, just to simplify things.
Jumper the drive to Master and put it on the SECONDARY IDE controller by itself. If you can't see it there, the drive is probably bad.
