USB<->IDE adapter cable does not work for some drives

I have one of those USB<->IDE adapter cable that allows you to plug an IDE hard drive into your computer via the USB port. It works well for my newer IDE drives but I have one older drive where it doesn't work. I hear the drive spin up but Disk Administrator doesn't see it. I've tried changing jumpers (master, c/s, etc) but to no avail.

Do the older IDE drives (e.g, an oXbox 8GB drive) have a slightly different protocol than newer drives?

 

its windows supressing it. its not the cable

 

With the newer drives, I don't need any jumpers, it just works. With the older drive, putting a jumper on master, c/s or none just doesn't work.

 

Set the jumper to master, then plug converter to HDD without pluggin it to computer on USB side, then plug the power cord to HDD, wait for it to initialize properly (usually 5-10 seconds) and finally plug USB cord to your computer. it should work now.
If it doesn't, it can be your HDD that is dead. To be sure you'll have to plug it internally to your mother board and see if bios detect it properly in an acceptable delay (not 1 minute for exemple).

 

I tried that and when I bring up Disk Administrator, it takes a long time (2 minutes) before finally showing all of my drives except for the USB-IDE one. The drive spins but that's about it.

It's a Western Digital Model WD80EB-28CGH2
I tried the following:

1. no jumpers (single or master)
2. jumper on master
3. jumper on slave
4. jumper on CS

In all cases, I configured the jumper, plugged in the IDE end, plugged in the power cord, plug power cord into outlet, wait 20 seconds for it to spin up, then plug in USB into computer.

I see the red light on the adapter blink solid for a few seconds before it does a series of 1/2 second pulses.

I'll get the old computer out later this week and plug directly into the IDE adapter. The last time I used the drive, it was working in the xbox before I upgraded the hard drive.

 

Is this an original Xbox? If so, you have to hotswap it. The Xbox needs to play a music file or something off of it to "unlock" it, then you can plug it in.

 

What PCB said (sort of). Xbox drives are locked to the motherboard of the Xbox. You can put it back into your Xbox and use something like ConfigMagic to unlock it.

 

My $0.02 worth..

FYI: It's not "Computer Select". It's "Cable Select" because depending on where the drive is installed/connected on an IDE ribbon cable, the drive will either set itself as master or slave.. you got the cable like this;

|================|======|
Motherboard Slave Master

Get it? lol

Yes, the drive needs to be unlocked or the system will only see a drive attached at most and also USB adapters don't have the ability to use the security features of an IDE/ATA/SATA drive technology.

But; you can unlock the drive using a drive unlocker/default password/erase prepare unit commands, but that wipes the drive without the actual password that was set (via the xbox'x EEPROM) which is unique to each xbox.

Now, if you were moving a good harddrive from a dead xbox to a good xbox with a bad drive, you need to swap over the EEPROM chip as well...LOL

Don't ask me how I know, lets just say I've used all my options and know-how and my own occasionally flawed logic to soft-mod two of my Xboxes, one with 80GB harddrive and the other with a 320GB hard drive with ALL space available to use.. No modchips (although I used one at first) an no BIOS flashes (tried that too, was nice until someone killed my second project... LOL)



Good Luck!