i had a slave hard drive in my old non-working XP pro machine. to retrieve data i bought an external USB kit to hook up to my new vista home basic laptop, but it doesnt show up in my computer. i see it in device manager and it says "working properly". i dont remember how/if it was formatted and i tried the different jumper settings to no avail. does not appear in disc manager either. if it needs to be partitioned, how can i do this w/o erasing the data? any other possibilities?

The message you are getting is probably for the External enclosure, not the drive itself. You may have the drive jumper set wrong. If you didn't move the jumper you probably need to. Read the instructions for the enclosure. You will either need to jumper as Master, Master alone or leave all jumpers off. The settings diagram is on the drive label. All the above won't help if the drive is DOA.

if, by message, you mean "working properly", no that is not for the enclosure(vantec usb adaptor), it shows the exact model# of the drive. otherwise there is no error message. jumper settings are as recommended by adaptor manufacturer, which is single or master (no jumper). drive is NOT doa. will partitioning it erase all data?

DO NOT FORMAT. Right click the drive listing in Device Manager and choose properties> volumes> populate. List what type disk and all the information below that.

upon hitting the populate button i get this message: "volume information for this disc cannot be found". any other ideas? my next step is to find someone w/ an XP machine and try it on theirs.

Well, I don't use Vista so I couldn't say for sure but I would think the OS doesn't matter as long as it can read NTFS partitions.

I have much same issue w/an EHD that seems to have been corrupted when I canceled 'turn off system restore on all drives'. Since then, Vista won't list the EHD, but my XP Home OS does (w/some effort). The only way I can see any files/directories, is to remove the EHD from it's enclosure, connect the HD to a USB dongle and then use the freeware 'pc inspector file recovery'. If anyone knows of a good tutorial and/or someone experienced in using that program, I'd sure like to hear from you. Sure that program or some other should be capable of helping to access the bulk of the EHD's file (intact wherever not fragmentedcorrupt), but I'm not experienced enough to use the program to its full capacity. Regards and hap-e-trails, Steve Hopper