Seems to me that your Seagate is severely damaged. Either the media or the circuit board might be damaged. Did you notice any overheating of the Seagate while you are trying to copy to/from it? Did you hear any strange noise from it when doing so?
If the laptop is also XP, the drive should be recognized without problems. Sometimes this may not happen if the disk is unusually partitioned (could happen if you manually dual-booted it with Linux, for example). Verify the enclosure is working properly and has enough power supplied to, and that it appears in Device Manager. If all this applies, the enclosure must be considered working and the problem might be in the partitioning or disk access.
In XP Pro, do Start > Run Command > DISKMGMT.MSC and press OK. See whether the disk appears (if it doesn't, it's the enclosure, or its drivers - or the disk was dying and is now dead, but that's not very likely), select the NTFS or FAT32 partition - ignore any others - right click and mount the unit as drive, say, G.
If it doesn't work but the partition is found, you may need a more powerful tool such as Paragon Partition Manager.
See also here: http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B307889&x=12&y=12
Some of the following answer assumes a windows operating or possibly DOS based operating system. If your original OS was not Windows or DOS -- there may be different considerations.
1) Did you lose the contents of both partitions? That depends were they soft or hard partitions. Soft partitions are created as files inside of other partitions If that is what you had allocated in the formatted partition you have lost their data content. Hard or physical partitions allocated using FDISK and some other utilities the second partition would still exist.
2) Where are/were your system files. Often but not always they appear as the first partition of the master drive on the primary IDE controller all assuming a PC (based on the master slave comments you have indicated.) (sometimes the second when diagnostics are loaded on the first partition)
a) if the partition on the drive you formated contained the system files yes they must be installed to access anything on the disk for the most part. A significant exception may be utilization of a DOS boot diskette might permit DOS access to the other partitions if they are formatted with the FAT file system.
NTFS partitions and possibly FAT32 partitions may not be accessible to all versions of DOS -- there may be some bootable CD's that would allow access to NTFS partitions without installing an operating system.
Question back from the DOS and older version of windows days and even some more modern operating systens in subsequent actions with the disk did you use FDISK or another utility to rewrite the boot blocks to point to a different partition?
Question this was not a dual boot machine was it?-- if so disregard anything that follows.
Question did the machine boot after formatting the partition and before you started moving the drives around? If so the operating system is probably on a drive you have removed from the machine. It needs to be replaced onto the same cable position it was originally located upon -- probably on the Primary IDE cable master position or jumper setting.
If not reinstallation of the operating to the formatted partition is probably the correct next step. Be careful in doing this because if you choose one of the other partitions that were not formatted it could wipe out the data in them based on the installation process chosen.
For the Seagate hard disk model ST3120827AS, the TVS diode is typically located on the circuit board (PCB). TVS diodes are designed to protect electronic circuits from voltage spikes and transient events. They are usually small, with two leads, and look like small cylindrical or rectangular components.To locate the TVS diode on the circuit board, you may need to refer to the hard drive's datasheet or schematic diagram, if available. Additionally, you can try searching for online resources or forums where individuals share information about hard drive components and their locations.Regarding the Cisco Nexus Network Switch , it's important to note that specific details about the internal components, including the location of TVS diodes, may be proprietary and not readily available in publicly accessible documents. For detailed information about the switch's internal components, you may need to refer to Cisco's official documentation or contact Cisco's supporthttps://www.serverblink.com/n3k-c31108pc-v-cisco-nexus-network-switch/
Try downloading TESTDISK and see if the drive is detected on the List within TESTDISK. If it is then you may be able to restore the boot sector within TESTDISK.
You will need an external Hard drive adapter case.
This will probably come with driver disk.
If already and external drive it may have internal firmware which talks directly to the PC.
Just install drivers, if any, and plug unit in.
Follow screen prompts.
You do not say what OS you were installing, and Windows limits what you can do with the hard drive during installation.
As you have found out, any power interruption during an installation will likely corrupt the process and make the system unbootable.
If you can restart the install at the very beginning that may work for you. However, I believe the simplest fix will be to use a live system bootable disk and erase the corrupted partition table on the drive then restart the install as if it were a brand new hard drive.
For that type of recovery I use gparted, which can be downloaded for free from http://gparted.org/livecd.php
Gparted live can be used on CD, hard disk, USB, or even pxe boot. I would delete all the existing partitions that were created during the failed install, then restart the install from the very beginning as if it were a new disk.
The hard disk must have crashed and only professional data recovery service providers can retrieve data from the hard disk. It will cost money and if the data is extremely important then only you should opt for data recovery.
You mean "lost" photos? or I don't understand your question. If lost, there are a number of "free" recovery software solutions as well as purchase type solutions. Otherwise, tomshardware.com has very good answers.
