External USB Hard Drive Problems

[jeff]

I have a Bytecc external USB hard drive enclosure and a 320GB Western
Digital IDE hard drive connected to each other and then connected to a
workstation via USB. The OS is XP Pro and I am having a strange
problem. At times the drive works fine and shows the files as a drive
letter. Othertimes nothing happens. I have replaced both the drive
and the case and still have the same problem. I've tried multiple
workstations, checked disk management and sometimes the drive will show
up in there, othertimes it does not. When it does and its not working,
the drive shows up as 298.09 GB healthy - 1749.91 GB unallocated. Yes,
that says GB. Lastely the system slows way down, to basically unusable
speeds.

So, what do I do?

 

[Kenny]

How is it jumpered? HDD's in an external enclosure should always be Master
regardless of what any other drives are.

 

[jeff]

The drive will not even show up in the Windows disk management if I
change the jumper settings from anything other than cable select. The
drive only has a Master/Single (which is no jumper), the rest are
either CS or slave. I used an external usb to IDE adapter and the
drive works sometimes as well.

Maybe the partition data or NTFS tables are screwed up?