Make Your Own External Hard Drive.

If you have an old hard drive lying around that you may have stripped from an old computer, why not turn it into an external hard drive - as long as it's not to damaged it can prove to be a cheap portable storage unit. I recently did one with an old 40 GB drive I had hanging around. Also, it might prove to be a cheaper alternative to buy a new hard drive (any size) and a drive case (sometimes known as a drive caddy) -there are some really cheap ones knocking about on Ebay and you'll be surprised what you can knock up.

Picture left is my old 40 GB internal hard drive, that I have placed in a caddy and turned it into a portable hard drive that works well off a USB connection.

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Picture left is the caddy I purchased on Ebay. If you prefer to buy new, Maplin Electronics Ltd have them or you can do a quick search by click on the Kelko search banner to the right.

Step 1: Depending on the make of drive caddy you have purchased, you will need to prepare it to accept your hard drive. With the one I'm using here, I needed to remove the end that had the connectors to connect to my hard drive. I used a smalle cross-head (phillips) screw driver to do this.

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Step 2: I then connected an anti-static wrist strap to ensure that I did no damage from the static electricity in my body. Another way to do this, is to hold the metal container with one hand and touch something like a house radiator with the other to ensure any charge goes to earth.

Step 3: Ensure connections are compatable. On the caddy, the white connector is the power and the black (with the yellow ribbon-cable) is the IDE connector.

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Step 4:  Make the connections to the hard drive, pushing gently but firmly until they click into place.

Step 6: Slide the hard drive into the main body of the caddy and secure with screws again.

Step 7: Once the drive is right in, remove the opposite end cover of caddy and slide out the pastic strip and insert the drive securing screws through the holes each side (encircle, picture left). Then replace the plastic strip and end cover.

Step 8: Re-secure the end cover.  And there you have it. Just plug into USB and you ready to go. If you are running Windows XP, there is no need to load any drivers. But anything before XP, you will probably have to load the CD that comes with the caddy.

 

If you Have Fitted a New Hard Drive.

If you have fitted a new hard drive, you will have to go into your Windows software (Disk Management) to make sure the computer recognises it. Here's how I did it on my computer running XP...

1. Plug the disk into a USB port an make sure it is powerred up.

2. Go to Start and open the Control Panel.

3.Double Click on Administrative Tools.

4. Double Click on Computer Management.

5. Click on Disk Management (usually situation under storage) and find the disk you have just created. It will probably say "Unallocated" or something similar.

6. Right click the disk and select "Initialise Disk" followed by "New Partition"

7. Follow the instructions on screen, giving your new disk a drive letter and then sit back until Windows has prepared your disk, which should then read healthy. Your new disk is then ready to use and can be found in the "My Computer" directory.