I pulled the main HD out of my old PC (motherboard died), and put it in an Adaptec Hard Drive Enclosure. I believe I have it set as a master (10 pins, covered left-most horizontal two). Plugged into my new Dell laptop (USB connection). Put in the installation CD; it didn't run automatically, so I browsed and ran Setup.EXE. Got a Copy File Error, then a message saying USB install was successful. Problem is -- cannot locate the drive. I've rebooted; plugged and unplugged, switched from Slave to Master -- no difference. Checked through Control Panel --> Install Hardware. Can't find it. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to SEE the durned drive. (I'm a non-techie, so please be gentle!)
If you're running Windows XP or 2000, check the following: Start->Settings->Control Panel->Administrative Tools. Go to Disk Management and see if the drive is showing up there. If it is, right click on it for a menu that includes an option to assign/change the drive letter. Another thing to keep in mind is that the drive probably requires an external power source as it may not be able to draw ample power off the USB ports. Just check that if the drive has a power connection that it's plugged in.
Thanks for the help. I'm running Windows XP. When I go to Device Manager, it lists the external HD (only if I install the device driver, which I'm not supposed to have to do with XP -- without installing the driver, the HD is not listed at all under Device Manager). When I click to populate info about the HD, I get an error message, "Volume information for this disk cannot be found. This may happen if the disk is a 1394 or USB device on a Windows 2000 machine." As I said, this is an XP machine, not 2000. I tried hooking it up to a different laptop, also with Windows XP, and got the same error. The HD does not appear at all under Disk Management, so I can't change the drive letter. BTW - the HD has its own power cord, so that's not an issue. I'm running out of ideas...thanks in advance for any suggestions!
Depending on the BIOS, it probably doesn't display USB drives. As far as getting it to work, try going to Adaptec's website and downloading the driver for your model. I wonder if the CD you have is just bad, or they have a CD that's got a corrupted file. If you can, try another hard drive in the external drive unit. If that doesn't work, you may just have a bad external HD unit itself, nothing to do with the driver or hard drives.
