Hi Jon,
Thank you very much for helping. I did not know there are different versions
of NTFS, much less that there are incompatibilities between them.  Your
explanation clears much of my confusion. The confusion was increased because
one of my SATA to USB cables was bad. I'm now connecting the drives with
BlacX USB docks, which are working well. I did some reading and found the
following on Wikipedia. It seems to verify your explanation.

"While the different NTFS versions are for the most part fully forward- and
backward-compatible, there are technical considerations for mounting newer
NTFS volumes in older versions of Microsoft Windows. This affects
dual-booting, and *external portable hard drives*." (emphasis added)

Thanks again to everybody who responded, Bob Lendrim

On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 7:37 PM, Jon Fairchild
<[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Robert Lendrim wrote:
>
>>  I have a 1 TB sata drive formatted with Acronis as a single logical NTFS
>> partition. I formatted it via USB using a Vista Thinkpad T60. The drive
>> works fine on the Vista T60. When I connect it to an IBM ThinkCenter XP
>> desktop, it is not seen. The little bell sounds indicating it is
>> connected,
>> but no notice on screen, and not seen by Explorer, Disk Management, or
>> Acronis. The desktop bios is latest Jan 2008. The desktop has a
>> larger internal 1.5 TB D: drive which works fine.
>> Can anybody help me get this workng, or tell me why it won't work? Thank
>> you
>> very much.
>>
>>                         PCBUILD's List Owners:
>>                      Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
>>                        Mark Rode<[log in to unmask]>
>>
>>
>>
> Hi Robert,
> The reason that you cannot see your drive with the desktop is that Vista
> uses a later version of  NTFS that previous versions of Windows cannot read.
>  If  you reformat the drive using your XP system you will then be able to
> access it from both machines.  You may have to use your Vista laptop to
> delete the partition first.
>
> Good Luck
> Jon
>
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