USB drive enclosure - drive not recognized?

[Louise]

I just purchased a Rosewill USB enclosure from Newegg.

I installed an old 40gig Maxtor drive that I had from an old computer.
It connected but Win XP Pro said it found new hardware, couldn't install
it and it wont work. And it was true - the drive wasn't recognized at
all.

It has occurred to me that there might be a problem with the jumper
settings. If I'm going to use it as USB drive, should it be slave,
master, select - what?

TIA

Louise

 

[Dave C.]

I just purchased a Rosewill USB enclosure from Newegg.

I installed an old 40gig Maxtor drive that I had from an old computer.
It connected but Win XP Pro said it found new hardware, couldn't install
it and it wont work. And it was true - the drive wasn't recognized at
all.

It has occurred to me that there might be a problem with the jumper
settings. If I'm going to use it as USB drive, should it be slave,
master, select - what?

TIA

Louise

Master with no slave attached (some drives require you to specify whether a
slave is attached) -Dave

 

[Art]

Master with no slave attached (some drives require you to specify whether
a slave is attached) -Dave

Louise & Dave:
Out of curiosity we've jumpered USB external hard drives in every
conceivable configuration - single, master, slave, cable select - and it
made no difference whatsoever in the XP OS either recognizing the drive or
any performance problem that we could detect as a result of jumper
configuration. So at least based upon our experience it would seem that
jumper configuration is immaterial when it involves a USB external HD.

Now I note Louise says it's an "old" Maxtor HD. I have to say the drives we
worked with are fairly new -- nothing much older than three years. I don't
imagine the age of the drive would be a factor in this case but I thought
I'd mention it.
Art

 

[Jan Alter]

Hi,
I ran into your situation a couple of years ago when external enclosures
hit the market. I bought a USB box, stuck in a Maxtor 120 mb hdd that I had
running from some older computer (probably 10 years old) and although XP
said it installed the drive I couldn't see it. I returned the enclosure
annoyed. The merchant at the computer show said there was nothing wrong with
the box, took off a 15% restocking fee and took it back (angry as hell at
that point).
Sometime later on I read some information that the drive may have needed
to be reformatted using the disk management utility in the control panel
(Administrative Tools> Computer Management>Disk Management).
What I might suggest is to first take the drive you wanted to install as
USB and hook it up to your computer with a ribbon cable to IDE channel 2 as
a master. If it's running OK the bios should pick it up as well as XP. If it
does then reformat it and stick it back into the USB drive.
If the bios didn't see the drive hooked up to the IDE channel then you'll
immediately know the drive is bad.

 

[Louise]

Hi,
I ran into your situation a couple of years ago when external enclosures
hit the market. I bought a USB box, stuck in a Maxtor 120 mb hdd that I had
running from some older computer (probably 10 years old) and although XP
said it installed the drive I couldn't see it. I returned the enclosure
annoyed. The merchant at the computer show said there was nothing wrong with
the box, took off a 15% restocking fee and took it back (angry as hell at
that point).
Sometime later on I read some information that the drive may have needed
to be reformatted using the disk management utility in the control panel
(Administrative Tools> Computer Management>Disk Management).
What I might suggest is to first take the drive you wanted to install as
USB and hook it up to your computer with a ribbon cable to IDE channel 2 as
a master. If it's running OK the bios should pick it up as well as XP. If it
does then reformat it and stick it back into the USB drive.
If the bios didn't see the drive hooked up to the IDE channel then you'll
immediately know the drive is bad.

Thanks for your help.

I changed the jumper settings to Master, then it got recognized and for
safety's sake, I reformatted.

But it WHINES like crazy. I forgot how badly the old drives used to
whine. I now use Seagate Barracudas in an Antec Sonata extra silent
case. Meanwhile, this aluminum box is stting on a shelf whining at me.

After all this, is it time to buy a new drive?

TIA

Louise