I have an existing hard drive that was formatted to be a slave (without OS) and has data already on it. I removed the hard drive from the machine and plugged it into a USB Portable Hard Drive. My computer will not recognize that the external hard drive is present. I do not want to erase the data on the hard drive. I want to be able to use it as back-up on 2 different machines.
Please help me.:confused:

Do you mean a portable hard drive enclosure? Are you sure its compatible with the hard drive? Did you check the CMOS settings to see what it says about drives?

It is an enclosure. I believe it is compatible and currenty I'm trying to play around with the master / slave / cs settings to see if any of them work. Any insight?

Set the master slave jumper as CS. The drive is connected via USB not IDE or SATA so that doesn't apply.

Thanks for the help, I'm going to try that.