I had been using a 40 gig drive as the only harddisk in the computer. I purchased a 320 gig and have installed Ubuntu's Gutsy Gibbon v. 7.10 on it. It is working perfectly.

I took the 40 gig (set as cable select) and put it into a usb drive box. I have tested the box with a 20 gig and the drive appeared as a usb device on the desktop and I was able to go the the usb's /home and move files to the 320 gig from the 20gig.

The 40 gig is another matter. If the usb box is turned on before I boot to the 320 gig, it causes a boot failure. The 320 gig can't boot.

I probably harmed the MBR and before setting the drive in the usb cradle have tried to use supergrub to restore the mbr, but that hasn't worked. When the 320 gig boots, while the usb is turned off, no problem, but when the usb is powered up, Place/Computer does NOT show the disk.

Output of lsusb:

Bus 004 Device 004: ID 06e1:d804 ADS Technologies, Inc.

[redacted]

so the device is "there", but how can I access it? I only want access to my /home to move files to the 320 gig drive.

Not all drives will work in a USB enclosure when set to Cable Select. When I put drives in my external, I sometimes have to set them as Master, or Master with slave present, or just remove the jumpers all together. It seems to be manufacturer specific, since all of my Maxtor drives need the jumpers removed, while WD drives need to always be set to Master.

Point is, you might want to play around with the jumpers on the 40 GB. Try setting it to Master, first off.

Maybe it would be better if I asked how I can use the working system to access the hard drive. It doesn't have to be in the usb cradle.

When that 40 gig is on the ide cable, no matter pri/slave, it locks the system. Nothing boots. I've tried supergrub but am not well versed in that, and the explanations are too geek-speak at times. Or maybe it's just not good English -- either way -- I can't make supergrub do much.

Any ideas?

After much tedious setting the disks back on the cable, changing file permissions and tweaking the two drives, I have been able to remove my /home's files from one drive to another. The target drive was then put in a usb cradle, the new boot disk repositioned on the cable and the files moved from the usb to the main drive. Whew!!!

Thanks, Community & Merry Christmas.