I bought a 250g hard drive and an enclosure at a show. Installed everything and all worked good. I copied files, music to the hard drive. After awhile the power supply went out.

I recently bought a new enclosure and fitted everything up. The computer running XP takes along time examining the HDD but never lets you access it. It did put up an icon for it but forget about getting into it.

What changed? How do I access it and save the info hopefully still on it?

It is connected through USB

Windows is saying it cannot connect to it. Yet I can attempt to access it through computer management.

Hi

Is this a SATA drive or PATA?

Have you swapped USB ports around to rule out a bad port?

Keep all ports disconnected but those you require and check. They pull power.

Also, list your system specs please and the power supply.

The hard drive is a wd2500JB WD Caviar SE

The computer is a dell Pentium 4 2.66 ghz

I performed a chkdsk /F on the drive and it works now. Not sure what it fixed but thanks for the assistance.

You need to assign it a drive volume, windows will then recognize it as a drive rather than just a storage device.