okay -- I needed to fiddle with the laptop to figure this out. I assumed the BIOS wasn't detecting them, because there wasn't any model info listed in the setup like there is on my desktop machine, but there isn't one with the working drive hooked up either. whoops.

will the empeg do anything different with the potentially-bad drive hooked up vs. one that works but is formatted incorrectly (i.e. the one out of the windows laptop), and would trying this hose the data? different output on the serial port?

I'm still pretty sure the 30g drive is dead, becuase it makes a constant rhythmic click-click-click when powered. I only threw away the 10g one, still have the other two.

unfortunately I don't know of any other players around here.