External USB drive problem

[Majicbringer]

I'll try to keep this to the Readers' Digest version as much as I can
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I have a HHD from a 2 year old system that I need to get info off of and into a new machine. I have a USB 2.0 IDE adapter I have used before many times to do the same thing that I tried to use here. Both my machine and the new machine (that needs the old info) will make the chime that says it's there and the balloon pops up from the task bar saying it's there, and the device manager for both machines say it's there and working; BUT it won't show up as a device in My Computer or anywhere I can get at it.
I tried running the old drive in the new machine as the Master and "Go Back" will run, but it just cycles through a text selection of start-up options, none of which work, then it cycles back into the Go Back and the start-up options over and over.


Anyone know any tricks I'm missing to get it to show up?

[cauzomb]

do you know what file system is on the disk you are trying to recover data from?

[Majicbringer]

Running XP.

[cauzomb]

is it FAT32 or NTFS?

[Majicbringer]

Well, if it's the formatting thing I'm screwed because I can't get either machine to register it's there to see what it is. Is there a way I can check the format of all the drives involved? Then I can reformat the external if necessary, provided it's one of the ways I can use the converter without nuking what's on it.

[F1]

It sounds like a drive letter that is already in use is being assigned to the external drive. Disconnect the drive/USB bridge then use Administrative Tools/Computer Management to change the optical drive(s) drive letter(s). Then plug the external drive back in and see if it assigns a previously-used drive letter. This happened to me under Vista......