laptop ide converter --won't work !

I bought a laptop ide converter to plug laptop hard drives into my desktop for data recovery. Is there a trick to get them to work properly? I can see the hard drive just fine in the bios, but when I get into windows no drive shows up. If I go to computer management in windows xp, it shows up there but has no drive letter and it won't let me give it one. I even tried different jumper settings on the HD. I am using an older pre ata/33 IDE cable...would that matter?

Thanks for any help !

Hawk

What does it say when you try to assign a drive letter? What is the drive status in the "Disk Management" menu? Do you have a newer cable you can try?

?(Drive letter not being assigned?)

It probably means that XP regards the disk as unformatted or unpartitioned.

I suppose the cable and jumper have nothing to do with it. You would have to check the disk by some means first. If it has no important data, simply fdisk and format it.

thx for the replies

in computer management, it says it is healthy and active. The only option it lets me do is to delete the partition, which I can't do because that would defeat the purpose of recovering filess off of it. I just don't see why it won't let me have access to the hard drive, because it sees it just fine in the bios and device manager. Would it be because it has windows xp installed on it ?

THX
Hawk

?(Recognition is one thing, Access or Use is another matter.)

Bios recognized it and passed it over to OS, and OS can't use it yet, because probably it isn't fond of this format. It must be behaving its usual ways. For the moment enough was said relying on your info.

We don't know what you want and what or how is on your HDD by what method.

How do we know that because? ?