My laptop died, but the hard drive was not the problem. I bought a sata/ata drive enclosure for my 2.5" laptop hard drive. I hooked everything up, but I am confused by the three usb cables. Which end goes into the usb drive, and where do the other two go? My laptop doesn't seem to recognize the drive.
One of my cousins had something simillar if i remember correctly if this is the same thing. One end goes into your external hard drive and the other 2 usb connections go into you usb connections in your laptop. One of the two connections are for the external hard drive to use the laptops power and the other basically runs the drivers so that u can use your hard drive and it can be recognised. I hope that helped.
Thanks for the reply. I can't figure out which usb goes to the enclosure, and which go into the laptop. There is one long one, which I assumed went into the enclosure, and two short, connected ones, which I assumed went into the laptop usb slots. However, the light comes on, but it doesn't blink or get recognized (and it barely spins...I'm hoping it's not completely dead!) I'm pretty sure the drive (spinny parts/disks) were fine, but I think the power components of the hard drive might have been damaged... Does anyone have any theories?
I would guess that the short one with two connectors goes into your laptop and that short cable connects to the longer one which then feeds into the external enclosure. Do you have a model that you're using so we can see pictures of it?
toadfilm, connect the cables to the back usb ports of your pc as found that most pc's don't have enough power to drive a 2.5" laptop drive if over a certain capacity as i found that with my 40gig drive.
