hi everyone ,recently i converted my internal hdd into an external using an usb casing 3.5".all that was fine...when i plug it the system detects it and says new hardware found and ready to use ,but iam not able to find drives relating to it..i checked disk management ,no use..in device manager it shows the name of the hdd..so,please help me out...

Did you jumper the drive as slave? Did you format the drive?

"in device manager it shows the name of the hdd". What name do you see there? What do you see when viewing Disk Manager? When the system detects something it isn't the hard drive it is detecting. The Enclosure is what is being detected. Should be called "mass storage device". As street indicated, you may have the jumper on the drive set wrong. Many enclosures will want no jumper at all. If the drive was functional before and you don't see any indications of that drive in Disk Management then the problem may be the jumper or internal data & power cables. The Enclosure should show up even without a drive inside of it. Are you connecting the AC power to the enclosure?

"in device manager it shows the name of the hdd". What name do you see there? it shows the name of the drive like STA18066 something like tat...its the ide cable no from the hdd i guess.. What do you see when viewing Disk Manager? its shows me all the partitions like i have c,d,e and f..other than that it shows nothing like unallocated one. ya jumper settings are perfect...i have given a external ac power supply ....one thing what i have not done is i have not formatted the disk....would that be the problem

Formatting the disk is necessary in order to use it. The confusion comes when you state you see the drive in My Computer. If you see the external drive in My Computer as unallocated space you can partition and format it from withing Disk Management.

If you used the drive internally and was seen by windows, it should not be necessary to format it. If you have any files on it that you don't want to lose, I would suggest connecting it up internally again and backup those files. XP has a habit of losing (sometimes corrupting) drives and also sometimes not seeing them when connected by USB. I personnaly think it's a bug(s) in the Disk Management 'renaming' code.

What do you see in Disk Management? Anything amiss is usually addressed. If you Format this Drive you will loose all Data. Could be that you need to take ownership of the drive before windows can access it. Search this site, I've seen it posted in detail several times. Jumper the drive according to Enclosure instructions. The one's I have require the drive to be Master. See related posts in this thread. There is nothing to learn from someone who already agrees with you.