How to make an external hard drive from your old, disused PC

You can use the hard drive from an old, disused PC you have lying around the house to make an external hard for your laptop

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Hard drive enclosure
• Disused PC
• Screwdrive

1. Before you start you will need to get yourself a hard drive enclosure. This will hold your hard drive and supply it with power. Enclosures can be bought very cheaply (as low as $20).
   
   You will have to make sure that the enclosure you get matches the type of hard drive you have. Check your disused PC's documentation to see if it has an IDE or SATA hard drive and get a corresponding enclosure.
   
   A quick rule of thumb is that older drives are generally IDE while newer ones tend to be SATA and PC generally have 3.5" hard drives.

2. Next you'll need to open the side panel of your disused PC and locate the hard drive. It's the one which doesnt have a corresponding hole on the outside.

3. Ensue to keep yourself grounded by touching the metal casing of the computer or using grounding wires to minimise the risk of damaging the components. Remove the screws keeping the hard drive in place. It may be located in a cage which you will have to remove first. Disconnect all the cables from the back of the hard drive.
   
   The hard drive can now be taken out of the tower unit.

4. Connect the cables in your hard drive enclosure to the hard drive as per the manufacturer's instructions and close it up. You may need to install drivers on your laptop, your enclosure instructions will say if you do.
   
   Congratulations! You've just made an external hard drive.

5. Now connect you hard drive to your laptop via a usb/firewire cable. Once windows tells you the device is installed, go to My Computer and right click on the new drives icon (Local Disc D in most cases). Select "Format". Preform a full format on the hard drive to remove all files including the old operating system from the disc.

6. You are now ready to start writing new files to your new external hard drive.

Tips & Warnings

• Don't be duped into buying a very expensive hard drive enclosure. You don't need any special software or tools to perform this task.
• This unit will need to be connected to an external power supply to work.
• The same principles can be applied to using an old laptop hard drive to create a portable external hard drive which do not require an external power supply.
• Remember to remove any files you want to keep from the old hard drive before formatting.

[RobertRichford]

on 5/27/2009 Fantastic article on How to make an external hard drive from your old, disused PC. Pasted it on 5*rec