either way, i'm sure they're not the drive i'm trying to format to test the adapter's safety. When i right click on either of the un-named drives to re-name them in disc management, following instruction on how to format my blank drive, the only option i get is a help file when everything i've read says i should be able to rename them and format them by right clicking on them. i did not install the OS, and am lost in os10 as nothing works like 98/XP where i've formatted drives dozens of times) remain when i unplug the hard drive. the hard drive is 40gb, and those two 'drives' (C: drive partitions i suspect. When in disc management, even with 'show hidden' selected, two un-named drives show up, one as a 39mb partition and the other as an 11.73GB active recovery partition both 100% free with no file systems. i can hear the drive spinning, so i know it's powered up, and i have the jumper set to slave, but nothing i try using online tutorials will get the drive to show up.

I cannot get my system to recognize a western digital 40GB IDE drive i'm running through a USB converter to test the adapter before hooking up a 120GB WD drive i have that has files on it after reading horror stories about some people's drives getting fried by some adapters. I have a dell XPS 8700 computer (intel core i7-4790 CPU 3.6 GHz, 12 GB memory, 64 bit with a 1TB hard drive)

Usb to ide linux