Issues recovering data via SATA USB Wire

Hello all,

After 5 years of use, my college laptop (Windows Vista) finally gave up on me a couple of months ago. Each time at start up, it would automatically go to the blue screen of death and never get past that point. I wound up getting a new laptop operating on windows 8, and now I'm attempting to recover some of my files from the old hard drive. After a little reading, I discovered that you can pull the old drive, connect it to another computer via a USB cable, and attempt to recover the data on the drive. So I ran down to the local best buy and picked up an Apricorn SATA Wire. Here's the problem. Every time I hook the hard drive up to the computer via the USB wire, my computer instantly goes to a blue screen and goes into a cycle of restarting itself over and over. Does this mean that my old hard drive is just too far gone to recover, or is there another method that I can try?

Any help is appreciated. (Disclaimer: I'm familiar with the basics of computer operation, but I am by no means a techie, so bear with me if it requires anything too complicated)

-Chris

You can just connect it normally like any other hard drive, inside your desktop.

If you still want to try that way, update bios to newest, and install latest USB 3.0 driver for it.

If Intel chipset, also install latest INF Update from Intel.com.

If you still need help after, run the tool then post results.

Thanks for the quick response. Pardon my ignorance in this area, but how would I update bios to the newest and install the latest USB driver? Forgot to mention, the wire came with a CD containing some cloning software, but my new laptop does not have a disc drive.

Visit the page at the maker of your laptop, for your model.

Are you connecting the external drive while the PC is off and then booting it? This may cause the BIOS to try to boot from the bad drive.

You should be able to plug in the USB cable when the PC is up and running, and if the drive is still working it should then mount as an external drive. If you get a blue screen when you plug the drive into a running computer then there is a serious problem with the drive or the wire.