I'm trying to recover some data for a student who is running Windows Vista (laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1420). When I hooked the laptop drive up to my desktop (Gateway 2610 running Windows Vista Business) I can see the drive and the partitions (2 partitions) in Disk Management, but when I go to my computer I can't access the drives (says that they are empty and have a total size of 0). Any thoughts?

I've already tried to recover the data from the laptop by booting it normally, but it freezes soon after loading the profile (you get to see the desktop then it locks). Disabling all non-essential services doesn't help (safe mode is the only way it will boot and I can't think of a way to get my corsair flash drive to work in safe mode).

Any thoughts, suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

Are you using a sata/ide-usb converter to connect the drive?
I sometimes need to reboot the host system when using mine to be able to mount the volume.
Is there an option in disk management to import foreign disk/volume?

The drive I was trying to get data off of is bad (or going bad). SMART hadn't said anything yet, but the seagate software we ran on it has found something like 40 errors in the first 10 percent of the scan. Probably explains a lot. Thanks for the help though.