This morning I had an in-court computer forensics action: I had to clone in-court some disks we seized in a search warrant we served some days ago. Easy task: you just need some basic equipment and tools, proceed very carefully and be patient. I started the action with the drive that was the biggest and the one we knew contained most evidences.

I plugged it in… and it wasn’t detected. I double-checked the cabling and stuff: same thing, again and again…

I was turning white-faced and a cold sweat was running down my spine. Then I realized the stupid thing I was missing was…

Order!

If you happen to connect an HDD to an external USB adaptor and it doesn’t get recognized, you can try this.

This is the scenario:

• SATA 7.200rpm hard drive
• Conceptronic SATA-IDE_3,5-2,5-ESATA-USB adapter (or similar)

Procedure:

• Plug-in power to the adaptor. Do not turn it on yet.
• Plug-in the disk to the required connector.
• Now, turn the adaptor on.
• Let it spin!
• Now you can plug the USB cable to the computer.

My experience with other drives is that you can plug-in power and USB in the order you like. There might be some issue with the power requirements for 7.200rpm drives (or maybe with this specific HDD)…

P.S: Don’t forget to set the drive jumpers as master if it happens to be IDE.