I'm trying to re-use a 3.5 inch HD that I removed from a PC running XP Professional, as an external USB mass storage device on a new PC running Vista home premium.

Although the new PC self-installed the necessary drivers I cannot get it to recognise the drive in the computer option. Could this be a problem associated with volume labels?

If anyone has experience of how to configure an external USB HD under Vista. I would welcome their guidance.

Was the hard drive originally an internal hard drive in the older computer? If so what USB hard drive enclosure did you install it into?

With the USB hard drive connected to the Vista system click Start > Control Panel
Double-click the System icon
In the System Properties window click the Hardware tab
Click Device Manager
In the Device Manager window expand "Disk drivers"

Does the hard drive show up in there? If not, try connecting the external hard drive to a different computer system to see if it reacts in the same manner.

I have several Internal drives that I connect with a 5 in one hard drive to UB2.0 cable adapter. This way I use all my drives with one cable. Not at the same time, and not really portable. But very cheap storage. Regardless I think the cable is very useful. The cable cost me $25 Canadian.