Keith W wrote:
> "Allen" <allent@austin.rr.com> wrote in message
> news:v4mdndALw6Wc2xrVnZ2dnUVZ_uWdnZ2d@giganews.com ...
>> I have four hard drives (3 old, one new); the three old ones, all
>> formatted NTFS, had worked OK in my previous XP system. The XP box went
>> down in flames and, as time was critical, I had to replace it with an
>> off-the-shelf VISTA machine. I can get only one of these drives to be
>> recognized in either of two USB enclosures (one is an old house brand
>> CompUSA box, the other is a new AcomData box). I have tried with backside
>> USB ports, frontside ports and two different USB expansion devices and
>> VISTA will only recognize one of the old ones and doesn't see the new one,
>> which hasn't been formatted yet. One of the oldies is an 80 gig Seagate;
>> the others are all Maxtor of 200, 250 and 500 gig. If anyone has any
>> suggestions, please, oh please, pass them on. I will be eternally grateful.
>
>
> Most external USB boxes require the drive to be jumpered as a Slave.
> However, I got caught out recently with one that only worked if the drive
> was jumpered as Master. No idea why, but it worked fine after changing to
> Master and that was on a Vista PC.
Follow-up: I had jumpered all the drives so I thought they were the same
as the working drive. Three are Maxtor, including the single working
drive. Silly me, I had assumed that all would have the same
configuration, but no; when I checked the labels I found that all three
had different jumper setups. I changed them all to master and all three
of those are working. Perhaps silly inconsistencies like that are part
of the reason for Maxtor's less than stellar reputation. Thanks again,
Keith for your helpful--and amazingly fast--response.
Allen