I just bought a hard drive from ebay as a second drive its a western digital 250gb ide drive but my pc will not recognise it as a storage device but it installed the drivers! what am i doing wrong?

The eMachine T3995 hard drive was originally an IDE 250GB drive. These drives are obsolete and hard to find.

I suggest using the following Generic IDE to SATA device on Amazon for about 7 dollars and then replacing the IDE drive with the SATA drive of your choice such as the 320GB Western Digital Blue listed on Amazon at about 25 dollars. Both IDE and SATA drives mount the same way.

The motherboard BIOS most likely have a hard drive size limit. Yes you can create two or mare partitions to use the rest of the hard drive space.
Go to Control Panel - Administrator Tools - Disk Manager to create a partition and format this partition.

Inside the LaCie D2 250GB (300770) external harddrive's case, is a 250GB IDE (PATA) harddrive that is 3.5 inches across in width.

A desktop computer sized harddrive. (May be a Western Digital WD25000JB)

The harddrive plugs into a small circuit board, (Bridge board), and the circuit board has a USB port on it.

Using this Western Digital Passport for an example,

http://www.xbitlabs.com/misc/picture/?src=/images/storage/wd-passport-250gb/p3.jpg&1=1

Scroll down to the second photo, and left-click on it. The case of the external harddrive is shown open.
Inside is a 2.5 inch laptop sized harddrive.
An aluminum tape strip covers the small circuit board, attached at the back of the harddrive.

The second photo down on this page, shows you the small interface circuit board, that the harddrive plugs into, with the aluminum tape removed.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/wd-passport-250gb_2.html

(Another design has wires coming from the small circuit board, to an interface the harddrive plugs into )

It is this small circuit board that goes bad in a LaCie. QUITE common.

Solution?

Simple.
1) Obtain a 3.5 inch IDE external enclosure
2) Remove the 3.5 IDE harddrive from the LaCie's case.
3) Install the harddrive out of the LaCie into the external 3.5 IDE enclosure.

An example of a 3.5 IDE (PATA) external enclosure,

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1733195&CatId=2779

For additional questions please post in a Comment.
Regards,
joecoolvette

Have a look at this article on external HDD troubleshooting. Helped me out in the past:
http://www.devicedriverfinder.com/blog/device-errors/external-hard-drive-troubleshooting

I had the same exact problem with a WD2500xms passport. The problem was the USB cable. I went to the store and bought a 6' USB cable ( $26 at Radio Shack) with the same specs and now, no more problems. Also I called WD technical support (800.275.4932) and asked for a new cable. The WD customer serverice was very helpful and said it would sending me a new cable for free. When it arrives I'll return the 6'er.

Format it with NTFS. FAT32 is limited to a max file size of 4gb and goes wacky with a drive size more than 62 GB..

you'll find that the external chassis is buggered, get a new one and put the hdd in and see if your info is still there.

there are a couple of reasons for this. Likely the drive has not been setup in Windows. Hard drives need to setup in Disk Management. Disk Management can be found under Computer Management in the Control Panel. After you run Computer Management, expand the Storage tab and Disk Management is located there. At the bottom of the screen threre is a listing of all drives (hard and CD) located in or attached to system... You will see your new drive listed, but not active. Right click on the new drive in the bottom window and Windows will prompt you on how to configure the drive. You'll need to activate so Windows can assign a drive letter to the drive, partition and format. Once this is done, you will be able to see and use the drive under windows.

I've attached a link from Western Digital that provides their FAQ response to your issue.....

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1017&p_created=1055796499&p_sid=7R8631pj&p_accessibility=0&p_redirect=&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9MTQsMTQmcF9wcm9kcz0yMjgsMTAxLDIxOSZwX2NhdHM9JnBfcHY9My4yMTkmcF9jdj0mcF9zZWFyY2hfdHlwZT1hbnN3ZXJzLnNlYXJjaF9ubCZwX3BhZ2U9MSZwX3NlYXJjaF90ZXh0PXJlY29nbml6ZWQ*&p_li=&p_topview=1

You didn't mention what type of connection it uses (USB, etc). According to Western Digital, if you have a USB External Drive, you should get a prompt to install drivers by Windows when a new device is installed. Similar for Firewire device.... Did Windows "recognise" the new device by opening a New Device Found window? If not, try using a different USB port and/or ensure the USB port is enabled in WIndows.... The Quick Start guides for all models can also be found from the link provided above.

Well, Occam's razor philosophy!  I just tried on my 250 Gb IOMEGA external HDD on Win98 and it worked. "Mass storage" jargon driver does NOT work. HOWEVER if you declare it as "USB FLASH DISK", it WORKS, (after computer reboots), though not that speedy. Anyway, you can do your job. Now if you have found any better solution, please forward it at [email protected]. Thank you! 

i have a feeling its not the hard drive thats bad i think it sounds like the case .
you can try buying another case and transfering the hard drive to it the case is around $20.00