I have a 20Gb Western Digital HDD model WD200.

When connected to my Dell Inspiron Laptop via a USB caddy it is recognized by the device manager and is advertised as having no problems. However, it is not displayed by Explorer and is also not visible in the Disk Management window. The jumpers are set to Cable Select.

I suspect the disk to be faulty as it tells the BIOS of another Dell Dimension what model of disk it is but it will not boot?

Any suggestions appreciated.

Which Operating System please? Presumably Win2K or WinXP?

DiskManagement doesnt show removable USB flash drives but don't know about such caddies. Has the drive been partitioned and formatted??

Booting via USB is sketchy and not always straightforward - even on mobos that purport to support it.

The OS is XP Pro - but I think we don't need to move this forward as I am convinced the disk is dead even though it is recognised by BIOS when plugged up as the master boot disk as it will not boot and cannot be seen by the XP recovery console.

It sounds like the disk spins up but it is just not visible to format or repair.

It was the boot disk for a Dell Dimension so it was formatted as the C: drive using NTFS.

Instead of looking in Disk Mangement have you tried looking in Storage -- Removable Storage -- Media after running compmgmt.msc

Your problems seem most likely to be software related since the drive can be seen in Device Manager.

and cannot be seen by the XP recovery console
This could be due to WinXP not having loaded the correct drivers or because the drive is incorrectly or badly partitioned and formatted. I wouldnt scrub the drive until you have checked it with the maker's diagnostic utility.

my ex-hd have to connect with jumper set to master...yup for the first time it not show in explorer,,,then what i do is, start/control panel/add hardware/choose which type(usb etc.)/just follow the instruction from the windows/ask you to find driver for the drive/try to search from your winds first/if not....use the driver that come with the ex-drive,if there is any(i think winxp do not have to use the driver since it is up to date OS)if it is driver failure maybe this problem will solved...but if it is hardware failure....if still have warranty right....if it is.....go to the manufacturer....

"so it was formatted as the C: drive"
Hence the partition is marked as "Active".
This may be causing a problem.
Which OS on which "Active" partition on which HDD is the system booting from?

Or is the system totally different with NTFS partitions? :confused:

Guys -

Thanks for the posts but in my humble opinion I think the disk has had it. It had XP Professional installed on it and it was working. Then the BIOS simply could not see an OS on the disk - even though it could see the make/model of the disk.

The XP professional recovery console could not even see the disk and neither was it available via the USB connection.

It does spin up and identify itself to bios but I think it is dead.