Hi Al.

There is some important info missing from your description.

1. Are the drives internal drives ,but installed in an enclosure and then connected to a USB port?
   or are you using an adapter?
  Always connect the power first and then connect to USB.
2. Are either the enclosure or the adapter powered by USB or do they have a separate power connection?
   Some ports don't support the load of the drive ,so it's best to have external power for either the enclosure or the adapter.
3. Have you checked if there are any jumpers on the IDE connector on the drives.? They have to be set to Master.
    see top of drive for info.
4. Are the drives formatted?

Does anything show at all about those drives in Disk Management?.

If they show in DiskManagement but not in Explorer, you may have to initialize the drives first.
Right-click the drive and select Initialize.
Even then ,they may not show up in Explorer. This is a peculiar thing about XP to hide some newly connected drives.
The easiest way to solve that is to use TweakUI for XP 
http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/c/a/fca6767b-9ed9-45a6-b352-839afb2a2679/TweakUiPowertoySetup.exe
After you install and run it ,look for  My Computer in the side menu and click Drives.
All available drive letters will be listed. (from A-Z)  You can till them all if you want.
At least ,when a new drive is attached ,there's a good chance it'll show in Explorer ,unless there are other problems.

Hope this will help.




From: "alan smith" 
Sent: Monday, April 25, 2011 12:00 PM
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [PCBUILD] external drive

 My  OS  win XPpro, SP3 +, 32bit.
 I'm trying to set up 2- 40Gb IDE drives to be used as EXTERNAL drives on a 
couple of notebook computers. 
I have an IBM desktop with a 40Gb drive and a tower witha 320Gb SATA drive partitioned into 5 drives, C, E, F, G, &H.
I've tried  the 2 - 40s on both of my units & I can not get my 2 computers to recognize the externals.
 I have gone intoDisc management & device manager, even used the troubleshooter!!
 Does anyone have any suggestions??
   Please!   
 Al Smith


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