USB drive

I have 2 USB (IDE) caddies.
I have 2 USB cables.
I have 4 hard drives.
I have 2 computers (PC and Mac).

I believed that both caddies worked and all hard drives worked. The computers do work.

I plug any combination in to either of the computers and nothing is recognised.

Any suggestions?

I suspect it's something dumb I've not thought of so even if it is obvious, feel free to say it. If I don't get this working, I won't have anything to stream to my new Sonos setup...

Thanks!

[maviczap]

I'll start with my simple knowledge before the techies storm in

Are the jumpers on the Hard drives set to slave position?

What OS are you using?

I know in Windows 7 there is a procedure to go through to discover a new HDD, I had to when I added a new SATA drive

Have you tried Googling the question?

Thanks for the suggestions.

Not sure the jumper matters when plugged into USB but set to master I think - will confirm that.

Windows 7 and lion.

Rgds

[maviczap]

Try this

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/...b-863f92f5595f

[L3nny]

You do have the hard drives plugged into power cables as well right??

Are the discs spinning? You will be able to feel this if you hold them and probably hear it too.

Jumpers wont make any difference on USB.

If you go to disc manager. Can you see the volumes in there?

Not sure of your knowledge so will put it in basic form.

click the start button
right click computer
choose manage
choose disk management on the left

This loads all the hard drives, if you don't see them in there then they are not being picked up by the computer at all. If they are in there then all you need to do is right click it and create a volume and format it.

Thanks guys.

I do have power (tried 2 PSUs to the caddies) - the lights on the caddies come on.
The drives don't seem to be spinning up. Does seem to be some movement in the drives but I don't feel the gyroscopic effect normally associated with a spinning drive.
I've tried USBdeview - nothing is shown.
Nothing shown in drive manager (and no unrecognised USB devices shown in device manager)

It's looking to me as if all the disks I've got are fried, tho I don't understand quite how so many drives could have fried at the same time. I'm sure I'd have noticed a neutron bomb going off in the vicinity of my humble abode.

As for my knowledge I don't really want to go into that because I don't want anyone to think "oh, he must have tried *that*"... I have no ego at all, I might be having a bad day; all I want is to be able to plug a USB disk into a router for some temporary storage.

Anyone got any other suggestions - however dumb you think they may be?

thanks

[maviczap]

See if they're recognised on another computer

[Viney]

Caddies knackered?

Its not that difficult to pop a drive actually into the PC chassis if you have the cables. As pointed out, you would need to switch the drives to slave.

How about other USB devices, sticks, iphone/proper phone kind of stuff? All recognised? If so, then its the drives or the caddies.

Thanks Viney.
My PC doesn't have much (anything!) in the way of IDE drives and all cables tied up out of the way but I'll rummage in the cupboard for some IDE cables and give it a go.
What I'm struggling to understand is why so many failures (disks, caddies etc)!

rgds