Why doesn't my newly built external hard drive show up in My Computer nor Disk Management?

Question

I just replace my enclosure of my western digital hard drive with a generic enclosure from ebay. However, when I plug it in it does not show up in My Computer nor Disk Management. I know the drive is getting detected because bubbles pop up (for detection of new things plug to the computer) and it shows up on the safely remove hardware application. I did some digging and realize that I need to partition my drive and assign it a letter; however, the drive doesn't show up on Disk Management so I don't know how is that possible. So what can I do now?

Answer 1

first thing i would do is make sure that the jumper setting on the hard drive is set for master since most external drive enclosures need it that way to work there should be a key of some kind on the hard drive that tells you what your master is

If that does not work try a different usb cable ive had some that did not like certain cables but would run on others fine

Answer 2

Probably because you're running Vista. I just purchased a drive enclosure and it worked like a champ with XP, but on Vista I wasted about 2 hours trying to figure out a way to make it work but never had any luck.

Vista is a steaming pile of dung.

Answer 3

Is it a USB device and does it appear on the Device Manager as a Mass storage device? Until it is in a format that Win doze recognises it will be invisible, so an old disk with a non windows O/S will need Formatting with NTFS to appear. If it is not in Disk management it may not be installed as a drive.