OK, figure this one out: Hard drive acting up
 

I just bought a new 300GB Seagate drive. I take it home, pull the smaller drive out of my external enclosure and pop this one in. When I turn it on however, I am greeted by the wonderful sound of the drive repeatedly trying to start spinning and failing. To make sure it isnt a bad drive, I stick it into two different computers--both work just fine, and I even formatted and copied a bunch of data over for more than three hours. When I put the drive in the external enclosure though, it does the same thing, despite the enclosure working fine with its old drive (its a third party enclosure meant to do just what Im doing with it). A few more points, to cover as much info as possible:

--the new drive is ATA100, the old is 133, so I dont think its a compatibility issue
--the new drive draws significantly less power than the old, so I dont think its a powering issue, despite what it sounds like
--it isnt a jumper issue, I made sure the jumpers were set the same on both drives and even tried other jumper settings just to make sure
--it isnt a formatting issue; the enclosure would work fine regardless of what it is formatted as, and anyways, it still does it after formatting

Im really stumped on this one. I would very much like to be able to use this drive externally without having to buy a new enclosure. Any ideas on what the hell is going on here?

Sounds to me like the enclosure doesnt support drives that large, likely when it came out 300gb drives wern't around. I noticed while shopping for enclosures myself last week that some stated "supports 300gb drives". So i guess that means not all do, and your is probably one of those.

Have you tried the 300gb inside that same computer?

what kind of enclosure is it?
What was the old drive?

You could test if it's a power draw issue by powering it from your desktop power supply while it's still in the enclosure. I agree it's doubtful, but it might need mucho startup current.

I've run into something similar where external USB/FireWire controllers didn't like the capacity or some other characteristic of the IDE drive and would keep resetting it, including power up/down. Annoying. The two I own have hard-coded capacity limits that weren't disclosed until I asked their tech support people. One of them does this endless power up/down loop. Argh. You might want to send the mfg. a quick email about this.

Excellent suggestion. I did just that, and guess what? It worked. So apparently it *is* a power issue (which is still kinda baffling given that the drive draws less, but I guess it needs more to spin up). I just threw the drive inside the case for now; Ill go get another enclosure sometime down the road.

Thanks for the help, yall.