It does look like I have the IDE cables in the wrong places.
As far as the drive problems go. This is external with USB, XP can find the drive but does not like reading it. "My Computer" will stop responding once hte drive is turned on. I can see a USB mass storage device in the device manager and on the Drive Management screen. It will sometimes give me an I/O error, I have never been able to get to any data once this started. I am not sure if the external is jumpered as a master, not ever sure how I would do that. Hopefully this answers some of your questions.
