External IDE hard drive cant be seen on a SCSI system

[paffo]

I have Compaq desktop with a 250 Serial drive and am running Win 7 32 bit. I also have a 250 external drive through a USB connection. When the external is plugged in the device drivers load and it shows up in the Device Manager indicating it's loaded correctly. I can't see it when I click on Computer or bring up Windows explorer to use it.

Anyone know why and how to fix???

 

[tsnor]

Did you partition and put a file system on the disk ? http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Create-and-format-a-hard-disk-partition (a new external USB drive will be preformatted, if you put a bare drive in a external enclosure it might not be...)

 

[paffo]

Did you partition and put a file system on the disk ? http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Create-and-format-a-hard-disk-partition (a new external USB drive will be preformatted, if you put a bare drive in a external enclosure it might not be...)

Thanks for the response.
Drive was formatted and is recognized on another computer but not on the one I want to use it on. I'm chasing down the fact that it may not recognize it since it has no drive letter designation. I'm going to use the disk management in windows to assign a drive letter and see if it fixes it. Will post results

 

[paffo]

Fixed the problem. I went into disk management where I could see the external drive. I assigned a letter to the drive and was able to see and access it through windows explorer. My conclusion is that this computer is not set up the same as the second where a drive letter automatically was assigned. This one does not assign a letter.