I have an old PC (about 20 years old) that I’ve not used in years. I tried it out today and it won’t boot up (I notice that the soldered-on BIOS battery is leaking and is kaput). I am curious what’s still on the harddrive (a Seagate ST3120A with a whopping 107mb storage capacity). I removed the drive and got out my handy-dandy IDE/SATA to USB adapter. I hooked it up (as I’ve successfully done with other drives). When I plug it into the wall (for power) the drive spins up but when I then plug the USB cable into another PC (Windows 7) the drive abruptly spins down and stops. It doesn’t appear as a device – USB or otherwise. Is this the drive’s way of telling me that it too is kaput or is something else happening? BTW, I tried changing the drive jumpers from “master” to “slave” and tried plugging into another PC (Windows XP) and even a Mac (OS X 10.4.11) but got the same result. This drive is not important to me any more – but I’m interested in getting an explanation of why the adapter wouldn’t/couldn’t work this time. Thanks for your help.