Boris wrote:
My daughter called me about this yesterday.

She has a 2009-2010 iMac running Snow Leopard. Well, it was running, but
about five years ago, the thing would not fire up, nothing, no sound of a
spinning hard drive, no video on monitor, nothing. It was like it was
not plugged in. She took it to the Apple geniuses, who told her her the
motherboard must be dead, so she put it on the shelf circa 2013. It was
out of warranty.

She now wants to get some files, mostly pics/videos, from the hard drive.

With the help of google, she managed to remove the hard drive. It's a
2.5" 500GB Seagate SATA. She connected it to my adapter/converter cable,
similar to this one

https://www.amazon.com/Generic-Adapt...erter-Optical-
External/dp/B002OV1VJW

and to her Win10 HP laptop. The drive spun up, but nothing popped up on
her screen. According to this article:

https://www.howtogeek.com/252111/how...ed-drive-on-a-
windows-pc/

she was expecting to get something like do you want to format this drive?

She also tried connecting to a Win7 machine, but no luck there, either.

She has not yet installed HFS+/HFSExplorer. She is going to wait until I
can help (tomorrow). But, if we are able to access the Apple hard drive,
can we move files to a Windows PC, and also open them?

Thanks.


You have to get a response from the hardware,
before any tools are going to work.

You can open Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) and
see if a new entry is present there.

You can use USBTreeView to spot a change in USB
when the device is plugged in.

https://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtreeview_e.html

The SATA device has to have power delivered via the
SATA 15p plug, for it to work. You need to plug
in the AC adapter, and use the SATA power plug
from the adapter.

A new entry should show up. For example, you might
see an entry with a VID/PID, yet it forms no "endpoints".
If the USB won't set up a communications path (because the
USB chip is defective), then USBTreeView will
have an entry (with no "endpoints" listed),
but Device Manager (or Disk Management) won't have an entry.

I've had a case where the external adapter firmware
got erased (by the usage of SeaTools), and I had
to reload the firmware before it worked properly
as an enclosure again.

The drive must successfully spin up, before the
USB enclosure chip will tell anyone about it. If
the USB chip can get a "drive ID" from the thing,
that's where it should start to come alive.
If the drive is not responding to commands
from the USB chip, then you won't be able
to see the drive on the USB side either.

Paul