My old laptop, a compaq pressario lasted me a couple of years.
Although it was cheap, it seemed reliable.

About a month ago, it overheated and burnt out my graphics card and CPU.
I removed my hard drive which was running on Vista and set it aside.

I am now stuck running Windows 2000 on an old PC, till I can afford a new laptop.
This could be a while as I am out of work and have a lot of events coming up which need paying for.
So I'm preparing to be stuck with this computer for a bit.

I thought about buying a SATA to USB cable and did some reading up,
Everything was saying I could simply plug in my laptops hard drive and use it as an External hard drive on my PC.

This all sounded great so I spent my money on this thinking I could retrieve my old files which I needed.
And make us of the extra space.

Today my cable finally arrived and I was pretty excited so I plugged it in and straight away I could smell components burning.

So I ripped out the power and had a look,
turns out the people had wired the SATA cable wrong.
So I rewired this in hope my hard drive hadn't been destroyed.

Now I plugged the Hard Drive into my computer and it doesn't show in any drive but in Device Manager and Safely Remove Hardware I can see it is connected and working fine.

I've tried running Disk Management and creating it as a new partition,
But it doesn't show in there.

I tried on my mums laptop which runs XP and it has the exact same problem.

Can somebody PLEASE help me with this.

I really want my old files back.

Definetly will rep you if you can solve my horrendous problem.

<3
Walka