I bought this IDE for 2 reasons.

ONE I had a Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop kicked the bucket, I want what's on that computer on my new Dell Latitude D530 running Vista.

SECOND is a old WB external hard drive my dearest brother took apart to put a second hard drive into the frame cracking a piece that bring in the power.

SO here I am with two hard drives that are perfectly fine that hold tons of stuff I want and no way to access it. I buy the IDE thinking, yah, this looks easy. I plug it in, the computer reads it (I only know this because of the windows sounds when you plug in to the USB and you can see it with the icon on the lower right hand corner 'safely remove hardware') but the drive does not show up on 'my computer'. Where else can I access this, I've tried both hard drives in the IDE but nothing, I know the USBs work fine, used thumb drives in all 4 of them.

Any help will be appreciated.

You may need to go to the Disk Management section of the Computer Management applet in the Control Panel and assign a drive letter, or at least see if the drive is showing up there.

No drives are showing up Any ideas?
http://i28.photobucket.com/albums/c2...rintscreen.jpg

I've tried to initalize it but it says device not ready. Am I missing a step or something?

So that we're on the same page, this IDE thing you mention is a USB attached external enclosure? If so, what is the brand and model? If the drives have IDE interfaces, the master/slave jumper configuration on them may need to be changed to whatever configuration the enclosure want them to be. The enclosure documentation may indicate what is required for installation, but often enclosures have little or no documentation.