How to access Windows 7 inactive Drive

Question

One of my very important drives become inactive. I have to make it active in order to use it again. I use Windows 7 Disc Management Tools to assign drive letter and make it active. I can see the drive now, but it asks me to format it before I could access it or I won't be able to access it. I think I will lose all my data if I format it. It was already formatted and active.

Here is the background about the problem. I put in a bad HDD (1TB), formatted that bad HDD that goes inactive all the time. It became visible and stable. To test that bad drive, I copy a folder about 6GB to that 1TB HDD. It failed in the middle and my good HDD that never failed became inactive. I changed around the SATA port cables to try to save both HDDs. I didn't care about the BAD one anymore. Now my good one is marked inactive and I am facing the need to format that good HDD in order to access it. Is there anyway to save my data about 150GB in this case?

Answer 1

It is very likely that you have a faulty SATA cable. These things can sometimes be very low quality and from your description it seems that this started happening right when you swapped the cables of "bad" and "good" HDDs. Get 2 new SATA cables for these hard drives and test them again.