[adalgisa]

I just bought a WD 500gb Scorpio Black Advanced Format drive for a friend to use to back up documents. She has XP Pro on her computer, and rather than run WD's align utility I thought I'd format the new disk on my Windows 7 64 bit system.

I put the drive into an external enclosure & plugged it into the USB port. The enclosure doesn't have a separate AC cord, just gets power off the USB port.
The drive is not recognized in disk management, nor in device manager, when I look under the USB hub.

When I put a WD 750gb Scorpio Black AF drive that I'd already formatted and partitioned into the enclosure and plugged it in, at first it didn't show either. I went into device manager, usb hub properties, and looked at the power tab. The drive didn't show. I clicked refresh, and the drive appeared. This didn't work with the new drive, however.

Could there be something wrong with the drive? or is there something else I can try?