Question Can’t get two old Maxtor IDE drives to show up in Windows 10

Feb 16, 2025
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I have two Maxtor IDE hard drives (2004 QuickView DiamondMax Plus 8; 2001 DiamondMax Plus 60) that I’m attempting to view the contents of on Windows 10 with a USB adapter. The devices show up in Device Manager but not when I look to try and browse to them. I’m not sure if it’s a jumper issue or what… ideas?
 
While drives may show up in Device Manager, their file format can be something the Win10 can not read. Like FAT16.

You'd have more success using era specific hardware, like WinXP build (that may struggle reading PATA drives as well). Win98 build should read PATA drives just fine.
 
Well they should be jumpered as Master to work. Cable Select probably would work. But since they appear in device manager, it's probably fine. Can you see anything in Disk Management?

It's entirely possible that such old drives have simply failed and lost some of their data. The music industry just recently discovered a huge number of their older drives are useless. If they don't show partitions in Disk Management, then the partition data has been lost, and probably some of the other data. You may be able to run recovery software yourself but DO NOT try to format or initialize the drives because you may overwrite something that could be useful. If it's very important data, send it to a recovery specialist.
 
While drives may show up in Device Manager, their file format can be something the Win10 can not read. Like FAT16.

You'd have more success using era specific hardware, like WinXP build (that may struggle reading PATA drives as well). Win98 build should read PATA drives just fine.
FAT16 wasn't being used for anything sizeable by the time of 2001, since the limit is 2GB. Windows XP also read PATA drives just fine, but did not read SATA originally.
 
The devices show up in Device Manager but not when I look to try and browse to them. I’m not sure if it’s a jumper issue or what… ideas?
They can show up in device manager without a device letter since it doesn't show it anyway, go into disk management and see if they have drive letters, if not right click on the partition and 'change drive letter' give it any available letter and see if it pops up.