I had a Fujitsu 2.5" SATA laptop hard drive die on my MacBook running Mac OS X 10.4.11 (by die, I mean I received the flashing question mark/folder, and Mac OS X wouldn't boot). I replaced the hard drive with a new one, and now I'm trying to recover my information from the "dead" drive.

I bought a Sabrent SATA/IDE to USB converter adapter. I hooked up my dead drive to the adapter, but none of my three computers recognized it - each computer runs a different operating system, so the dead drive was not recognizable under Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X 10.4.11. The Sabrent adapter is not defective, as I tested it with an old 3.5" IDE hard drive and it worked.

When I plug the hard drive/Sabrent adapter into the Windows machines (XP and Vista) it recognizes that a USB Mass Storage Device has been connected, but I am unable to access the hard drive from Windows Explorer or Device Manager.

Essentially, I'm trying to determine whether the drive is completely dead. When I plug it into the Sabrent adapter, I can feel and hear it spinning, but I'm not sure if power = "not dead."

Any information would be incredibly appreciated!

Question/Problem: I'm working on cleaning up my Dad's laptop, mainly by uninstalling programs I no longer need. So I'm viewing the "currently installed programs" list, and lo and behold he's got Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 (at 795MB), Microsoft Office Project Professional 2003 (at 147MB) and Microsoft Office XP Professional with FrontPage (at 538MB). Do I really need all three of these? Or did he just install Office 2007 and forget to delete the rest?
Another quick question:The file system on the disk is FAT32. I remember reading in some computer mag some time ago that NTFS was more stable, and they also had a step-by-step on how to change it. I did that on my computer - should I do it on this one too?
Operating System and VERSION:  Windows XP Professional (sp2)
Web Browser and VERSION:  IE 7
Your level of experience: Beginner