Old 4.3 gig WD drives will not slave externally

Ok fellow hardware/os geniuses...

I emptied out some old pc's in my closet

I now have several 8 gig drives and some 4 gig drives, old maxtor and western digital and seagates

I used one of my usb to ide connectors to get the data off my maxtors with no problem, but the WD and SG drives would not be found... odd...

So I bought another external enclosure, and bam, the 8.4 gig WD and SG drives were found...

But, none of my usb to ide connectors or enclosures will make my western digital WD Caviar 24300 (4.3 gig) ide drives work....

Same in XP SP2 or Vista Ult SP1, Device manager sees the drive, loads the driver for the usb to ide and sees the drive by name, shows WD24300 in devmgt, but will not mount it in disk mgt, xp does not even show it in disk mgt, vista shows it in disk mgt, but shows as not initialized, which is odd, regardless, it will not initialize it, all 3 of the WD 4.3 gig drives pull the same issue... and when I did tell vista to initialize it, it yeilds an i/o error...

Yes... i have tried multiple usb to ide connectors... yes... i have tried multiple enclosures... yes... i have tried every possible jumper combo, single, master, slave, cable select, samo samo...

So... how do i get xp or vista to see my old WD 24300 with an external connector or enclosure...?

Survey Says .... !!! ???

Tx

Matthew