I have new hard drive in macbook pro(08) and have SATA cable with external power source to old hard drive (10.5.8)via. USB port and newer drive(10.6.8) will not recognize older drive..Do I need to partition newer drive with older disk to recover data?

wayno08 wrote:

I have new HD 750GB Hybrid in 2008 Macbook Pro 17" w/ Snow Leopard 10.6.8

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connected to old Hard drive(250GB that had 10.5.8 on it at time of failure) via SATA cable to USB port with external power source..

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Computer not acknowledging old HD at all in Disk Utility or otherwise (that I'm aware of)..

Not mounting? Bad SATA to USB cable, not attached right or wrong power source or something.

Disk Utiltiy would at least show something.

Do I need to partition New HD and load old(10.5.8) onto partition to recognize older drive for data recovery?

No, newer versions of OS X can read the older drive formats, and how can you load the old drive onto the new one if you can't read/mount it?

It's likely a problem with the SATA cable or power, or if the drive is not spinning it could be dead or dysfunctional or something.

Try another USB to SATA adapter.

I think it's a problem with the cable or data connection, perhaps the adpater or enclosure your using.

Install MacDrive on a Windows PC and connect the drive there and/or internally and see if you can transfer files to a thumb drive or something like a exFAT external drive.

You do not need to load 10.5.8 onto your new drive in order for a 10.6.8 system to see the contents of a 10.5.8 system.

You might want to check out the hard drive troubleshooting bootk in the downloads section of this web site:

http://scsc-online.com

They also sell a product named Phoenix that can do OS extraction and volume copying/cloning, but to be honest I don't know if it's appropriate in this case.

I would suggest the following:

1. Open up Terminal.app (under utilities) and type "diskutil list" without the quotes. This is the command line version of Disk Utility. If the external drive doesn't show up at all, then it's likely not connected properly, not getting power, or just plain dead. If it shows up with only a devce name like disk0s16 but no volume it means the drive is seen, the OS just can't make sense of it.
2. Assuming the drive shows up, I would try to boot off the original installl disks for the system and run Disk Utility from that. I'm assuming the drive will show up. You'll want to select the option to repair the drive and then perform the option to repair the permissions.
3. If the unit isn't showing up, as per step 1, try a different USB port. More importantly with your unit, try it on another side of the unit if possible. If you read the book I referenced above, some of those units have I/O boards that are separated from the logic board. If the cable from the logic board to the I/O card goes bad or has problems, which isn't all that uncommon, some or all of the ports on the I/O card may appear to be bad as well. If you use a USB port on another side, it would be routing out of a completely different I/O path, so that's a potential problem.
4. If the drive is only seen with a device name such as disk0s16, it's likely either the index files are corrupt beyond Disk Utility's ability to see them. The only thing that I think would help would be a product named DIsk Warrior, but I can't guarantee that.

Disk Warrior can be found at:

http://www.alsoft.com/diskwarrior/

The company that I linked in the first link above also makes a product named Scannerz that does HD and system testing. The Scannerz/Disk Warrior combination make a good pair because the complement each other....Scannerz does what Disk Warriror can't and Disk Warrior does what Scannerz can't. However, at this point I'm not too sure getting a tool like Scannerz would be of much use because it sounds like the damage has already been done.

Let us know what happens.

If none of that other stuff works, try resetting the NVRAM or maybe even do an SMC reset. Apple's docs are at the following:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964