Building an external hard drive

[yuhoo22]

Hey everyone,

Although I have built several computer before I never tried building an external hard drive before because I never had a need. Now that I recently purchased a laptop, the need is there.

My question is: If I buy the enclosure and an internal drive, what do I have to do so that I can use the external HD as a plug and play drive? Is there software that has to be installed? If yes, would I have to install this software on every computer that I plan to hook it up to? Or will it just auto detect in Windows?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Malak]

The external enclosure will connect to your computer by way of USB, and will simply show up like any other USB drive, like thumb drives. It's very easy to use.

 

[yuhoo22]

sweet.....that is good to hear.

Another question though...In order for me to use it with both a MAC and a PC, would I just have to have a partition in the drive and format each appropriately? Will I be able to transfer files between them this way?

 

[Atheus]

OSx should be able to read FAT32 partitions, but Windows will not read the unix file system, so format the whole disk FAT32 with windows and you should be fine.

 

[yuhoo22]

Well I bought a seagate 160gb hard drive last night from BB (thanks to this forum for the heads up on the sale) and borrowed an external enclosure from a friend. I just wanted to test it out before I invest another $40 into this project.

So I mounted the hard drive, set the jumper to Master, plugged in the IDE and power cable, flipped the switch and......nothing happened! :-(

Tried 3 different machines (2 desktops, 1 laptop all running WinXP) and they all had the same result. I also tried a smaller, older drive in hopes that the enclosure did not support that big a drive (160GB) but also had no results.

Can anyone help me out? What am I missing? What else do I have to do to get the plug and play to recognize the disk?

Edit: I did mount the new drive in a PC as a slave, and disk manager sees it but I keep
getting an error saying it can NOT format the drive. Is there a problem with the drive itself?

Thanks in advance!

 

[KGB]

Have you tried the HD in the external enclosure with it jumpered to Cable Select?

When you had it in the PC as a slave, were you able to create a partition?
You have to create a partition before you can format it.

 

[yuhoo22]

I didn't try cable select....I guess I should have considering I tried Master, Master with slave present, and slave.

I was able to create a partition, but could not format the drive. Under disk management it wouldn't even try, but by right clicking the drive in my computer; I was able to have the progresss bar move the entire length only to have it say it couldn't format it at the end.

Could it be that the enclosure doesn't support that big a drive? Although i doubt it because i also tried a 8GB drive with no results either.

 

[skisteven1]

don't forget you can't format a 160gb drive into just 1 fat32 partition.

 

[yuhoo22]

Yeah, for now I just want to get it formated using NTFS to be recognized by my desktop. All the other computers including the mac will have to wait until later.

 

[Mutilator]

If all else fails you could install the drive as a slave in your PC and format the drive that way... that'd help narrow it down to whether the drive or the enclosure is having the problem.

Typically with the enclosures I've used I usually set the drive to master.