Vista attached mass storage via USB problem. For a new drive with nothing on it if you attach it via USB to a VISTA os, you don't see the drive in the windows explorer. So I used an XP machine, copied a file to it, unplugged the USB drive from the XP machine, plugged it into the Vista machine and I was able to see the mounted drive. The empty drive did not mount. This problem is probably not consistent across all device driver/Vista distributions. My USB/hard drive combination is based on building one using an off the shelf 20$ IDE drive and IDE<-> USB converter. There are no device drivers except for the USB driver which comes with the OS.