Freezing issues with accessing laptop SATA

[MSgherzi]

So I bought a SATA enclosure off ebay a couple of weeks ago. When my brother's laptop crashed, I attempted to recover his data using the enclosure. Well, every time I connected it to the enclosure and turned it on, explorer.exe would just freeze. I'd try to bring up My Computer but the enclosure was causing it to freeze because as soon as I'd flip it off, everything unfroze and all of my clicks during that time then began to take place.

Well brushing it off as an ebay special, I sent it back and managed to get my money back because it happened with 2 other sata drives, all laptop drives. It only worked with one of those drives only once and that was it. I ordered another brand new one off of newegg. I got a 500gb external drive off ebay which is apparently new, took it apart, and have been using it as a sata enclosure. Well, when I connect a SATA drive from a desktop, everything works fine. But when I connect a SATA from a laptop, everything freezes again like the other enclosure. The same thing happens when I boot into UBCD4Win, even when I try something besides MS Explorer. Why does explorer freeze? It only happens when I open up My Computer to try and access the drive, the window is just white like it's trying to load and nothing happens. Both of these are plug and play so there shouldn't be any problem especially since it'll work with a desktop SATA just not a laptop SATA.

Any suggestions?

I didn't try safe mode but I don't think it'll work since it probably wouldn't automatically start.

PS. I've tried both XP and Vista, a laptop, and 3 different desktops, all of them freeze when trying to access the drives.

 

[purple_minion]

I had an external enclosure freeze up and drop transfers if I was in USB 2.0 mode. As far as I could tell there is no way to force winblows to use the slower 1.1 standard. However if I booted into linux and removed the 2.0 module I could transfer to my hearts content.

I would try booting into systemrescuecd or another linux cd and once she's up and running plug in your drive. At the terminal type "dmesg" and look at the last few lines as they should give you much more info then I've EVER gotten out of winblows. It's how I figured out my enclosure didn't like usb 2.0.

 

[MSgherzi]

Wow, I guess there's no such thing as file transfer being easy anymore. What if I run Linux on an emulator. Wouldn't that still work? If so, what's a good free emulator (I can't remember if VMWare has a freeware version or not)?

 

[ithinkyou5.0]

easyest n most hassle free way is to boot into a linux live cd like ubuntu or knoppix often virtual machines dont like linux and theres alot of piss farting around to get it to actualy display correctly

 

[purple_minion]

Wow, I guess there's no such thing as file transfer being easy anymore. What if I run Linux on an emulator. Wouldn't that still work? If so, what's a good free emulator (I can't remember if VMWare has a freeware version or not)?

I would simply use a live cd as that will allow linux full access to your hardware. Usually virtual machine don't have complete control over the hardware and that's exactly what you want. A live cd will not alter your hard drive unless you choose to install it. It simply runs from the cd much like UBCD. There is ubuntu, as well as systemrescuecd and others. I suggested systemrescuecd as it's CLI and so would be quicker to simply see what linux spits out. Of course you could do ubuntu and then surf google while trying different things you find online to see if anything works. Always an option.