External miniStack V2 hard drive not seen, well most of the time

Hello, I bought a Newertech miniStack V2 hard drive enclosure a while a go and put an 80gig IDE maxtor hard drive in, worked flawlessly, recently figured I needed more space so I got myself a 500gig IDE Ultra ATA Seagate hard drive and the trouble started.

The computer doesn't see it, except once, I plugged it in and waited 20 minutes and it appeared in disk utility, but any options would just hang the program so I couldn't format it. Usually, the disk does not appear anywhere. If the enclosure is turned on and plugged in the computer while starting, the computer doesn't get passed the gray screen until I turn the enclosure off. I have a windows XP partition and I get the same problems with it. I tried going back to the old hard drive and this one still works perfectly, I also tried setting it in slave and master but with no success. I know a 500gig HD should work because people in forums have been using it.

You think the drive may be damaged ? What else could be tried ?

Thanks,
Francis.

Sounds like this particular drive is bad. Since it is just new, can you take it back and exchange it? That would be the easiest way to test this out.

Since it is IDE, I would also check all the connector pins on both sides to make sure none are bent, broken, out of place... a missing line might just cause some havoc!

Finally, what kind of Mac do you have? Are you sure that it is compatible with Ultra ATA? Is that ATA/100 or ATA/133?

However, I would guess that it is just a bad hard drive...