I don't know if anyone can help me here but I'll give it a try. Or maybe
someone can direct me to the proper newsgroup.

The other day I bought a USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE cable from WorldStart that
connects from a hard drive to a USB Port. You're supposed to be able to
connect the cable and a letter drive comes up. Then you can connect a hard
drive to it and it will act as a external drive. I have five old drives that
I want to check the information on them. Problem is, a letter doesn't come
up so I can open the drive. The light comes on in the cable, and you can
hear the hum of the drive, but no number comes up. Can anyone help with
this?

Any help would be much appreciated.

TIA

G@ry

Those type of devices are "Very" sensitive to how the drive is
configured ( If it's a traditional PATA 80-pin ) with it's jumper
for Master/Slave or Cable Select. Sometimes you have to set
the jumper to a different configuration for Windows to properly
detect the drive. I've used several and had lots of issues with
certain brands of disk drives ( mostly Maxtor ).


"G@ry" <gdelcarlo@cox.net> wrote in message
newsr23j.16690$1R.13971@newsfe07.phx...

"G@ry" <gdelcarlo@cox.net> wrote in
newsr23j.16690$1R.13971@newsfe07.phx:

Most of these cables don't work quite like you describe - you connect the
drive to the cable first, then to your computer. The letter is assigned
to the drive, not the cable.

Another possibility is that it is being assigned the same drive letter as
a drive inside your machine (another common problem). If you go into
disk management (run diskmgmt.msc), you should see the drive there, and
can change it's letter.

Also, check the master/slave jumpers on the drives. Usually these cables
work with the drive set as master. Another problem can be something like
Western Digital drives, for example, that have a separate setting for
Single that is different than Master or Slave (you probably want the
Single setting in this case).

About half of these USB to IDE things that I have seen come with a very
poor power supply that often doesn't even spin up many old drives. That
could be your problem, but if you hear the drive spin up, it's probably
not. You could try using one of the power supply cables in your computer
to power the drive (but this means opening the case and it's probably not
a good idea to plug this in after you start up the computer).