[ContentUnknown]

Hey everyone, here's my problem.
I bought a USB hard drive Dock so i could just plug in hard disks. some no name made in china thing. drivers were on a mini cd so i didnt install them, and i couldnt find them online.

plug it in to power, plug it in to usb place the maxtor 500 gig hard drive in it and it, the hard drive spins and clicks but wont show up as a mounted drive. a assuem either the drive is bad(it's refurbished and has a dent in the case) or the dock is bad, so i ordered a SATA/IDE usb cable so i can plug in the drive and check the drive.

so the new cable comes, the drivers for this are for MAC OSX 8.6 and i no longer have the old environment. so i decide to try it anyway, instead of initially checking the maxtor drive i plugged in a 2.5 drive from my old powerbook, the drive is slightly damaged but it was bootable in the old laptop. it doesn't mount, but it does spin.

next i get out the Maxtor, change the plugs around on the usb cable thing, plug in to a power source, and its spinning but doesnt mount. it does however show up in System profiler under USB/ Keyboard hub/ storage device. ( i just discovered it isnt seeing the drive but the cable)

is there some general driver i need for my system to see this or should i just consider this an epic fail and send everything back? i thought USB was pretty much plug and play, what's going on with this?