I removed all my 6 hard disks from my PC, had them mounted to USB enclosures so that I could read them from my laptop. Unfortunately, only the one with OS installed in it can be read. I heard that it is necessary to format the hard disk before mounting it to the USB enclosure, is this true? As I have a lot of dvd movie backup inside, so it would be a waste if I have to format them. Any help or advice will be very much appreciated. Thank you. P.S. The remaining 5 hard disks, 4 of them were connected to an IDE controller card. They were all reset to MASTER before mounting to the USB enclosures.
don't have to reformat them before going into usb case. does the laptop see the other drives at all?? are they using the same enclosures? what format is the drives & laptop? what windows are you using??
No, besides the one with OS installed (Windows XP), the remaining 5 were either appeared as a drive but cannot be read, or did not recognised by my laptop at all. They were all connected to the same enclosure. Those drives are either in FAT32 or NTFS. As for my laptop, it is in NTFS and is running on Windows XP Pro.
when not recognized by the laptop, was it the drive or the enclosure not seen? did the icon appear at the bottom right corner when drives attached??
The HDs were fixed to the enclosure and then connected to the laptop USB port. There were two situations: 1) The laptop recognised both the enclosure and the HD (e.g. removable drive [F:]), and an icon would appear at the bottom right corner. However, I was not able to read anything from the HD. 2) The laptop could not recognised the HD (but recognised the enclosure). In this case, the drive would not appear in My Computer.
