Following a power failure at home, our family computer booted to a black screen with a message that the system could not locate a bootable boot volume (or something like that). I can hear the HD working and the BIOS sees the drive. Using a boot CD, I booted the system up and from a command prompt, tried to access the C: drive. Got the message 'the system cannot find the drive specified'. I pulled the drive and insterted it into an external drive case and then plugged it into my laptop. The laptop recognizes new hardware and attempts to setup the external hard disk but, is not able to do so. No drive letter is associated with the external drive. This is a SATA drive and I'm using a SATA external HD enclosure. There was no master/slave jumper on the drive so, I assume it is set at master by default. Any suggestions on how I may be able to access the data on the drive? I'd like to recover pictures and MP3's on the drive if possible. Thanks for any help.

Try to maybe borrow/use another computer pop it in move the files onto the compiter then to a USB device. OR buy a external dock for teh HD and take the files through a USB cable to your computer.

I did put the drive in an external dock and tried to connect it to my laptop. No luck. Thanks for your reply.

With the External enclosure connected look in Disk Management to see if the drive shows there. If so, you may need to take ownership of the files/folders and possibly assign a drive letter. To learn how to take ownership look at the link below. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421