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Can an external USB hard drive be converted to an internal hard drive?

E

edprush

Platinum Member
I have a Maxtor external USB hard drive that is no longer being recognized by my Win XP PC.

I was wondering if it was possible to convert it to an internal hard drive and install it as my secondary/slave drive. I was hoping this would make my drive readable.

Thank you.
 
If the USB enclosure's controller board has failed, then yeah that could make it unusable.

External drives are just standard IDE hard drives connected to an IDE to USB bridge controller. (Though I suppose eventually they might start using SATA drives.) Crack open the casing however you must, and pull it out. As long as the drive itself didn't fail, you should be able to just set the jumper to slave and it'll work.

Of course if there's a warranty on the thing, you might want to get it replaced instead of destroying it.
 
Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
If the USB enclosure's controller board has failed, then yeah that could make it unusable.

External drives are just standard IDE hard drives connected to an IDE to USB bridge controller. (Though I suppose eventually they might start using SATA drives.) Crack open the casing however you must, and pull it out. As long as the drive itself didn't fail, you should be able to just set the jumper to slave and it'll work.

Of course if there's a warranty on the thing, you might want to get it replaced instead of destroying it.
Click to expand...

But if I get it replaced I will have lost all the data on the external hard drive and I'd like to try to recover it.
 
Two possibilities:

1. controller failure: Crack open the enclosure, attach the drive to your motherboard IDE or SATA, and get back all of the files you really needed to have more than one copy of. Keep using the drive for extra storage in your PC.

2. drive failure: crack the enclosure, attach drive, get back nothing, get no free replacement drive since you just voided your warranty.

With (2.) the "freezer trick" (google and search) might let you get back some files before the drive dies for good.

It's up to you whether the (low) chance of the failure being the controller instead of the drive is worth losing your warranty over.
 
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