undetected external drive

[yozzer2001]

have put an old 2.5 inch hard drive out of an old mp3 player in a usb external enclosure, but when you plug it in to usb port you get the noise and the usb mass storage device attached message but the drive doesn't come up in my computer?
any ideas ,could it be the drives just bust(you can feel it spinning if you hold enclosure)

 

[Boah]

Can you see it in Disk Management? (Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management, then Disk Management). It may be you need to delete the old partition and reformat it to FAT32 or NTFS so Windows can recognise it before it will be listed as an accessible drive in My Computer. Of course doing so will wipe any data currently on the drive.

 

[yozzer2001]

well thank you very much ,i will endeavor to remember this in future.
it now works a treat