External USB 3.5" HD Enclosure Not Working

Post by **obsidian** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 12:10 am

I just went out and bought an external USB 3.5" hard drive enclosure. It's a Bytecc ME-350U2 enclosure and I'm putting in an old Maxtor 40GB HD.

I formatted the hard drive through a parallel ATA cable hooked up to the inside of my computer. FAT32 (I'll be copying some stuff off old computers using FAT32 HD's), single 40GB partition, no problems there.

I plug the HD to the enclosure and set the jumper to master. Hook it up to my computer with the USB 2.0. Windows XP will not recognize the external hard drive. It won't even pick up as an external USB removable storage device. I've used USB pen drives on this computer without problems, so it's not a USB issue. I also tried it on another computer... same thing, won't recognize the disk.

I then unplug the hard drive from the enclosure and pop it back into my computer using the parallel ATA. The computer reads the hard drive perfectly fine.

Anything that I'm doing wrong or do you think there's something wrong with the enclosure?

Post by **Kills On Site** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 12:59 am

Are you using the power cable on the external case also?

Post by **obsidian** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 1:22 am

Yes, of course.

Post by **obsidian** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 5:12 pm

Also, device manager doesn't pick up the device. I also tried looking in Control Panel > Administriative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management. The HD doesn't show up there either.

Any thoughts?

Post by **obsidian** » Mon Apr 25, 2005 6:54 pm

One last thing, I may have the option of paying $20 extra for the USB 2.0 + Firewire version (this one is just USB 2.0). Is it worth it? From what I gather, USB 2.0 is theoretically a bit faster than Firewire 400 but I'm not sure which one actually performs better.