hard drive shows in device management, not in explorer

I have an external device that allows you to read IDE hard drives via a USB port.

I have five different hard drives that I've tried to read with this device.

Each time, the computer (running Windows XP) recognizes the USB device by plug and play, says "new device found: hard disk" and then says "your device is ready to use". And each time, the hard drive DOES show up in device management under disk drives, and says "the device is working properly." Try updating the driver, says the driver is up to date.

BUT it does NOT show up in windows explorer nor in disk management.

I've tried each hard drive on two different computers, and get the same problem each time.

I've tried restarting the computer, no luck.

I've done searches on the internet for this problem and apparently it's a known issue but nobody knows what to do.

Any ideas?

 

From the way you described it to me it sounds like it's probably going to be an issue with the device you are using to read the IDE drives. What is the brand and model number of it? I'm thinking that the device is either faulty, or like you suspected the drivers for it are poop.

Do a google search on the device brand name and model number to see if you can come up with new drivers for it.

When / where did you purchase the device?

 

There is no brand or model number... it's a generic IDE to USB device I got off ebay. And to see if the device itself was the problem, I also tried a metal USB hard drive enclosure, which has worked great with my 300mb external hard drive for the past 3 years... and the drives didn't read on that either.

Which would lead one to assume the problem might be the drives, but all five of them?