I foolishly purchased a Kingwin Blackjack BJK-35USBI from Newegg for the low price of $14.99 + Shipping and Handling.

Big mistake – this thing is terrible.

First, the documentation says nothing about it working with Windows XP. And it doesn’t – most of the time.

That said, I did discover a trick to get it working some of the time.

The manual (if you can call the little piece of paper containing instructions for other systems a “manual”) says that you should set your Hard Drive jumpers such that your drive is the “Master” device. I tried this with 3 different drives on 3 different computers, and it never worked. (For real.)

What DID work, though, was setting the drives to “Cable Select,” or “CS.”

Don’t ask me why, but this works, while setting the drive to “Master” doesn’t. I tried this with drives from three different manufacturers – a Western Digital, a Seagate, and an IBM made by Hitachi. Setting each of these drives to Cable select made the Kingwin work. (Sometimes.) But none of the drives would work when set to “Master.” Ever.

Go figure.

I’d be interested to hear if this solution works for you. If it does, let me know in the comments.

Here’s something else I’ve discovered about this Kingwin USB drive – when it does work, you can only connect it to your computer once before having to reboot. ONCE. Fortunately, I found a work-around for that, too.