I want to convert a external 300gb ide hd into a secondary (drive d:)internal drive on my lenovo m52 but it does not recognize the drive what do I do

Should not be a problem but here is a thought. Have you change the jumper on the IDE drive to secondary? Failing that, can you contact the IDE drive company for help?
Jim

do you have a recovery disk for the internal hard drive? this is the disk that came with pc.your internal HD is important this have been wiped (you have no OS) . get your internal back in order........do you have a receipt that says you purchased a 300gb (not 3gb) take it back get your money or the right external... once you are able to use the pc double check the external hard drive

I guess you have an ide/ata motherboard. There are pci converter boards to connect internal sata
hd's and adapters to use sata hd's externally via
usb.

Change the settings of you IDE drives in your BIOS. Set your secondary boot device to HDD1. Also make sure that your primary HDD is set to master and the secondary HDD is slave. The jumper is found at the back of the hard drive where you connect the power and IDE cables. Try this and post back as to how it went..

Hi,

Appreciate the direct "Ask Me".

T your concern:

• initially, pls verify that it is indeed an external storage problem rather than a laptop USB issue by trying other USB devices and determine if they are recognized and working;
• disassemble the enclosure of the Acomdata external hard drive and remove the actual hard drive;
• you would need the use of a 2nd PC, a desktop that could accommodate the HD from the Acomdata (IDE or SATA);
• install the HD from the Acomdata as a Secondary Master or Slave internally to the 2nd PC;
• boot the 2nd PC and determine if the HD from the Acomdata will be recognized as a local drive;
• chances are that the partition of the HD from the Acomdata was messed up. This would explain the blinking blue light;
• download and install a file recovery program. An example is GetDataBack (unfortunately not a freeware but DEMO is available) and do a recovery. It would take some time based on the size of the HD from the Acomdata;
• temporarily save the recovered data in the 2nd PC. You can burn this likewise into a DVD backup should the 2nd PC be capable of that;
• after recovery, re-partition and format the HD from the Acomdata while still attached to the 2nd PC;
• should the re-partition and format be successful, you can transfer back the temporarily saved recovered files;
• a nice, simple, fast and safe partitioning/formatting software is Partition Magic (unfortunately not a freeware but FREE TRIAL is available).
• should the re-partition and format be not successful, you can replace only the HD and/or claim warranty.
  

Hope this be of initial help/idea. Pls post back how things turned up or should you need additional information.

Good luck and kind regards. Thank you for using FixYa.

I understood your problem there are two different connectors
SATA:

And PATA:

If your computer has IDE (PATA) connectors you need an adapter like this one:
Native SATA Drive to IDE 40-pin Adapter for Most Enclosures

i had a maxtor one touch go bad and had to open the case and take it out of the external casing and put it into my computer as an internal drive. then it worked fine. it was a single drive.

just today i had a maxtor TB drive go bad, and since i think it has two drives inside it i am very worried that i will not be able to do the same thing.

If the drive is set as Cable Select you are allowing the motherboard to detect where it is on the ribbon cable. If the drive is shown as Primary slave then the drive is on the wrong connector on the ribbon cable. If it is shown as secondary master than the IDE cables on the board need to be switched (primary to secondary, secondary to primary)

You didn't specify if the original PC was Windows or MAC.

Is this USB external used on a PC with Windows? If so is it formatted NTFS? If so, Mac OSX and pretty much everything else but windows NT, 2k and XP can not write to NTFS. OSX and Linux will read an NTFS partition but at this time not write to it. If your drive is formatted NTFS, I would say, go to a windows machine and convert it to a FAT 32 Partition. Most everything will both read and write to FAT32.

sounds like the USb Port is burned out, might as well chuck it