Jerry-rigging an external hard drive

I was having difficulty trying to find external hard drive enclosures for 5.25" Hard Drives. I've been toting one around from my first computer which crashed years ago. It ran Win98 and upgraded to 2K before lightning took out the ethernet port mounted on the motherboard. Got a network card to replace it but apparently there was something important about installing the driver before installing the card. I guess I was a rookie 8 years ago and tried to treat it like installing new hardware and it crashed. I managed to use it as a slave drive on my mom's computer for a short while. And I've been toting it around ever since figuring one day I'd get an enclosure for it. And possibly dig up some old forensic data restoration techniques if needed (I don't know what shape its in these days)

I was digging through some old boxes looking for something else and came across it. And got inspired to hop online and finally scope out some enclosures. I found a few, a little more expensive than I'd thought. But they'd work in a pinch. Only some of them talk as if you can mount anything in them. Mostly for CD-ROMs. Which then looked a lot like my first external CD-RW drive. So I realized that drive was basically mounted in an external enclosure much like I was looking for. So I took it apart. It won't fit my hard drive in it, but it will hook up the wires. Only bad thing is when I plug it into either of my computers, both Vista and XP want installation drivers. They won't just install it as a generic storage thing like with flash drives and whatnot

Any ideas on making either of my computers happy with this or should I go buy a real enclosure which might come with an installation CD xD

Have you set the jumpers in back to specify it's a slave drive? I assume so since you mentioned using it as a slave drive before, but it's the first thing I thought of.

Did it ever have some kind of installation drivers for it ?

:redface:

It doesn't have a slave/master area separate from the IDE connectors. I can't remember if the old IDE cables were just that much thinner, or if its auto-set to some kind of setting already, but that could be the issue. Regardless, the IDE cord in this thing takes up the whole space. I was hoping it was just set to cable select or something. I dunno xD Its a good possibility that is the problem, though I wouldn't know how to work around that one since the only slots in the back are for the power and the IDE cable. No jumper section