I've bought an external USB Hard drive enclosure for a 15GB Quantum fireball I had spare, but I've set the whole thing up and Windows isn't detecting the drive. I've tried it with the jumper on master, slave and cable select. Which jumper setting should I use, and does anyone have any ideas why it might not be working? The USB drives are fine and are enabled in the system BIOS.

Surely the enclosure came with printed directions, or directions on a CD? The drive jumper should be set to master or CS - personally I never use CS. If it's an IDE drive, if the cable connector will go on either way the stripe on the really short data cable must be next to the power connector. The power connector must be connected. The drive must be detected by your motherboard bios. If it isn't check the settings in your bios Setup pages. The drive must be partitioned and formatted to NTFS or FAT32 in order to show up in My Computer and Windows Explorer. If that hasn't been done, you can partition and format it in Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management - Disk Management.

Are you connecting the AC plug for the enclosure to the mains? Where in Windows are you looking for the drive? Check in Device manager to see if it is detected there. If the drive isn't formatted then it won't show up in My computer. To format it go to Manage> storage.

Yes, the AC adaptor is connected to the mains, and the data and power cables inside the enclosure are connected correctly. The drive was previously the main drive in a Windows 2000 PC, so it is formated in the NTFS format. However, I can't find the device in device manager or in disk managment, so I reckon the PC isn't detecting it at all (i've tried it on different XP computers as well, with the same result.) Could it be something as trivial as a faulty USB cable between the drive and the PC? Or any other ideas would be welcome!

Is there a power switch for the AC? If so, the drive should spin up when power is applied. I have an exclosure that was bought empty. When I first turn on the power the drive light goes on and the drive spins up. This check would determine at which end the problem lies. Are you sure the USB port you are using works?

"Could it be something as trivial as a faulty USB cable between the drive and the PC?" Yes, and that would be easy to check out. "Which jumper setting should I use" I always use master.

Once the drive is recognized, if the Win 2000 installation on the hard drive that was set up on another computer boots, you must install the drivers for your mboard if it is not identical to the one on the computer Windows was set up on. Windows will find some things on it's own, but you must load the drivers for the mboard chipset as well so that Windows has all the proper info about the mboard and will work correctlty with it. Win 2000 must have at least the SP3 updates installed to recognize and support USB 2.0 hardware. If Win 2000 will not boot, the hardware on the too mboards is too different and if you don't want to lose what is on the hard drive you must run a Win 2000 Repair Setup, which will set Win 2000 to the new hardware, at least enough to get it working. You still need to install the drivers for the mboard after Setup is finished. If the USB cable to the external drive is plugged into a port in a hub, not everything will work properly connected to a hub, even if the hub is "powered" - has it's own power supply so that it can supply 500ma to every port even if all ports are used. Plug the USB cable into a port directly connected to the mboard.