External Hard Drive keeps disconnecting

[peachbelle]

My windows 7 motherboard crashed on my laptop but the hard drive is okay. I needed some files over the weekend and figured out how to change ownership of my hard drive (put in a SATA enclosure) to my mother's computer.

Today I plugged my external in and I think I changed ownership correctly. I can access my files on my local disk but I got some errors saying that the "parameter is incorrect" and kept connecting and disconnecting all my drives on the external (it's split into like 4 or 5 separate ones).

Eventually it let me connect to my local disk and I was able to transfer some of my files. Now I'm transferring a big group of 75 gb and it keeps disconnecting every few seconds. It also told me that the drive needed to be repaired, but when I run the scan and repair option, it never finishes and then just errors out.

After I get this 75 gb transferred I'm fine with wiping the harddrive clean and turning it into an external, but it's making transferring my files very difficult.

Any ideas without losing my data?

EDIT: Okay, it seems like it can work with USB 2.0 but not 3.0. I tried to change the power settings like I've seen some people suggest but still didn't help

 

[Clintlgm]

Sounds like you could have a bad cable?? USB 3.0 requires perfect cables I've had several new ones that were bad! It also sounds like that hard drive is crashing!! Could be either or both. Good luck I hope you get your data off of it. Again Back up back up

 

[peachbelle]

This cable is literally 4 days old, I can't imagine it's a bad cable.

And it would have been cool to backup my hard drive, but my motherboard crashed so this IS the backup.

 

[alphanumeric]

I've seen some external enclosures act up if the drive inside doesn't get enough power to run. Does your enclosure have an external power pack? If the USB cable has two USB plugs at one end make sure you plug them both in. If it has that type of cable one will be DATA and power and the other just power, the two plugs look identical.

 

[madcratebuilder]

I agree with alpha, could be a power problem. I know some 2.5 inch hdd's can power up with a single usb cable but the 3.5" need more power to run. USB can only supply up to 500mA.

 

[caperjack]

try moving a smaller amount ,not the whole 75gig at once