Hello!

My family has this old internal hard drive, a WD400 Enhanced IDE, 40GB, with a date of 30 Sep 2003. It used to be in a PC running XP, but that machine bit the dust a while back, and I thought we might be able to get information off of the hard drive by purchasing an external enclosure and running the drive off our current PC, which uses Vista.

So we bought the enclosure, I hooked it up and plugged in the USB. The old drive powers up, and the Vista PC sort of acts like it recognizes the drive, but we still can't access the info on the drive. When I open up the "Safely Remove Hardware" window, it lists a USB Mass Storage Device as an "Initio WD400EB-11CPFO USB Device", but when I open the "Computer" window it does NOT list any drive corresponding to the old drive description.

Did I miss a step somewhere? Is this drive dead or does it not work the way I thought it did?

I posted some photos and screen shots that might help. Any assistance would be appreciated. Thanks!

From your desktop or the start menu right click on computer and select manage. If prompted confirm that you want to run the program. Now, on the left hand side, select Disk management under Storage. In the main window look for the device and make sure that it shows up. If it does then it simply wasn't assigned a drive letter by windows which you can remedy here by double clicking on it and giving it a drive letter.

If it doesn't show up then there is either a problem with the drive, a problem with the enclosure, or a problem with your computer recognizing the drive. Depending upon your resources you can test the set up in another computer or you can test another hard drive in the enclosure. If neither work for you I'd ask for a return or exchange because it's possible that the enclosure is defective or a poorly designed model (which I've had happen).

As a note I do not advise that you run the drive outside of the enclosure because if you don't know what you are doing you could mess up the drive and/or the enclosure. You must be extremely careful with the drive and the internal parts of the enclosure. Follow the enclosed directions.