What should I look for when my IDE to USB enclosure doesn't show the drive in Windows?
I have 3 IDE drives and following is the situation
Works
- A pretty old drive of 400MB works in a salvaged old computer boots in Dos and I can navigate
- A pretty old drive of 40GB works in a salvaged old computer boots in Dos and I can navigate
- A more recent personal drive works in my IDE to USB enclosure visible as drive in windows
Doesn't work
- Both pretty old drives do not work in my IDE to USB enclosure.They spin up but don't become visible in Explorer.
This similar question might hint to the cause with mentioning jumper settings but I find it hard to believe. The power-up sequence most certainly is not the issue.
Note – I don't have access to the old drives and salvaged old computer anymore so there isn't anything I can readily test or verify what makes this more of an academic question. It left me curious enough to ask.
Best Answer
There is no real reason why an IDE disk would not work, but there are some reasons why there might be quirks.
There were some oddities in terms of sizes and LBA modes, but nothing that would break anything or prevent it from working.
The main thing though is that IDE disks did have a Primary and Secondary jumper, sometimes also called "master" and "slave", that dictated which connector on the cable you fitted them to and which one showed up to the system as the primary disk. It is possible that if they were the secondary disk in a system and you had a USB caddy that does not support the cable and jumper selected primary or secondary mode then it may simply not "see" the drive. Essentially the drive is expecting to have a particular pin pulled high or low to tell it that it is the one being addressed. If the controller does not use that line then the drive will stay silent and not respond.
Alternatively Windows may not have assigned a drive letter to the disk, or the disk may have somehow been corrupt. Using Disk Management would have told you whether Windows itself could see the disk which would have told you whether the problem is the disk format or the USB IDE enclosure.