How to --USB hard drive ??

External hard drive cases are cheap on eBay,
often direct from Hong Kong to your door.
I got one that was beautiful unless you look
at the adapter circuit board closely.
Flux mess and corrosion on solder joints.
Failed too, but it was so cheap and it was all shipping
and on buyers part for returns so not worth returning.

I got some other IDE/SATA adapter boards for
other purposes. Had good luck with one type but
some others are not worth effort to ship back.

You got lots of good advice but I would add the suspicion
about the adapter circuit board being no good.

Do you have a desktop system with an IDE port?
I'd put each IDE onto another system's IDE port
and run up the Windows Install CD to delete
partitions and create new partitions.

If you use the options right in the install CD you
can partition all three then exit or reboot.

Until the drive is formatted it may not show up
in parts of Windows. Unformatted partitions
do show up in the disk manager utility.

Control Panel
Administrative tools
Computer Management
Disk Management

That utility allows formatting of raw partitions.

I don't fully trust third party programs for formatting.

Once you have a known good formatted drive, then
if you hook it up through the external adapter and USB
you eliminated the possibility of bad drive.

If you have a spare power supply UNIT power
the external IDE using that to eliminate power
usage as the culprit.

OLD IDE drives tend to use more power than
later model IDE drives, too.

That's why a POWERED external USB drive
case would be better than one that gets power
from one or two USB connectors.

Doesn't SP3 include drivers for external usb drives?

So:
Eliminate possible format issue by doing that
directly or on a working good machine.
Eliminate power drain issue using a good old power supply unit

Then let us know how it goes!