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WoodraxFlag for United States of America

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External IDE Dock: Certain drives not working properly once connected to USB port

Good Morning!

I am attempting to archive several old IDE drives to newer SATA disks before disposing of the obsolete drives. I am connecting these drives to an external IDE Dock and Power Supply from Cables to Go. I also have a secondary dock.

Both the C2G and secondary dock have their own power supply and IDE interface. I am having problems with a trio of these drives, where they spin up normally when power is supplied, but are exceptionally slow to connect to any system when connected to the USB interface, and sounds like it is resetting over and over while trying to connect.

Normally, I would think this is a physical failure of the hard drive. However, there are 3 different drives that are displaying the exact same behavior. One of the drives is the exact same model as one of my functioning drives, and it displays this "resetting" behavior along with a pair of older drives. I have tried adjusting the jumper settings, with no change in behavior.

Has anyone experienced this type of issue with externally docked IDE drives? I know IDE is very obsolete, but I am hoping someone has had this issue before, and found a solution.
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John
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I have a dual IDE / Sata box to hold desktop and laptop drives. It comes from Star Tech, plugs into 120 VAC and works for all drives.

Do you have a known good IDE drive?  Try that so that you can determine either (a) the unit does not work right or (b) the drives were all bad.
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John,

There is a sentence that answers B: One of the drives is the exact same model as one of my functioning drives, and it displays this "resetting" behavior along with a pair of older drives.

I know it is a bit ambiguous, but that just showed that I have a pair of Maxtors that are the same model. One of the drives works with the C2G setup, the other displays the odd "resetting" behavior. The reason I am reluctant to call it a physical failure is because the same behavior is occurring on 3 different drives.
May I suggest you try a different IDE / Sata adapter. They are not expensive.
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I will try my other dock when I get home, and update this thread if one or the other works.
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try changing the M/S jumper from M to S or the other way round
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nobus

I have tried moving the Master/Slave jumper to different positions. Unfortunately, this did not help.
Test those disks using the manufacturer's diagnostic tools while attached internally to a PC's IDE port. Many mainboards still have at least one IDE connection.
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nobus
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what drive models have the problem?
i have several old drives, and i never had problems powering them on again - if they were ok before
but at taht period, usb did not yet exist, or just became available,  so yes the best option is to have them connected to hardware of that era, with the same OS: win95, or 98 probably - could be XP also
so if you have an old PC sitting around - try reading the drive on these