External HDD - windows detects but will not display drive

[Duff-Man]

I just bought two hard drive enclosures, capable of playing media files (http://svp.co.uk/products-solo.php?pid=1627). I also bought a couple of IDE Maxtor hard drives - a 160Gb and a 320Gb.

Now, I hooked up the HDDs to the enclosures, set the jumper to master, and plugged them in. Windows recognises the USB mass storage device, and gives me the "your device is ready to use" message, but does not display the drive in 'my computer'. The FAT32 format device supplied with the drive also recognises it, and correctly determines its size.

My question is - what is stopping me from accessing the drive? I have tried formatting the disk, although it says that will not be neccesary under windows XP. My other external HDD and usb memory sticks etc appear as expected in 'my computer', so why not these? I tried the jumpers on 'cable select', but no difference.

Thanks in advance for any help

 

[Scream]

When you say, you can't access the drive, do you mean, its not listed in 'My Computer' etc for you to open it but you can see it in a disk management utility?

If this is the case then my guess would be that you have to assign it a drive letter. I get this with Server 2003.

You can assign it a drive letter via Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management.

 

[Duff-Man]

Yes! That worked, thanks

Just had to add a partition.