I just installed Ubuntu 9.04 and, the hard drives of my former computer being IDE, got an insixt IDE to USB connector with power supply. unfortunately Ubuntu doesn't event seem to notice there is hardware connected(the HD is active- I can feel the head going around when I lay my hand on it).My former comp was an XP machine, so I downloaded the ntfsprogs packages, but even that doesn't seem to help. Did anybody here run into this issue before?I would be grateful for any help you can offer

PS. if it is relevant, the jumper is in the "slave" position.

plz check the "dmesg" output and see if you can find the presence of a new harddisk(sdX).

You did...

Did you put your IDE HDD in an external USB HDD box, like an ICY BOX? If so, you should have set the HDD jumper to Master. If not, please explain more about the HDD connection.

If you have a live-cd, try to boot it to see if it picks up the HDD. I often use a copy of PartedMagic or SystemRescueCD for such a test, thinking that if something is there, they'll find it.

thorkelljar: no, not an ICY Box- I have an IDE to USB cable adapter and a power supply planned for IDE hard drives.

I suspect in one of them there is a hardware issue- even an XP machine won't recognize it.The other has since been backupped and reformatted as FAT32 and it works great.