Porch Enclosure

I don’t believe I have any interior SATA cables and am using a new hard drive I just bought fresh out of package. I know I have to setup a partition but is there a way to do it in an external enclosure that I already own(and was planning on using to run the drive)?

I tried plugging it in and firing it up and it recognizes its a Mass storage device but cannot access it.

After connecting external HDD, go to Disk Management in Computer Management in Windows. The external drive should show up in lower right portion of Computer Management window. Right click on the drive and you will have the options to partition and format the drive. Once formatted and assigned a volume label, it should show up in upper right part as additional drive(s).

Is it just like a case for your external hard-drive? Does it do anything extra that the external hdd can’t do without it?
Oh i probably should have wikied this lol.

It has the circuitry in it that enables USB or Esata to power up and run the hard drive, and also provides protection from elements and people with peanut butter on their fingers.

You could run the hard drive outside the case, but you would have to connect it to the cables inside, including the power cable, and then, the drive would just be hanging and in the way.

So the case is not just a case, it has a small circuit board inside and a special plug to match the hard drive (IDE or SATA), so if you bought a case, it would have to match the hard drive plugs, IDE or SATA
And the case makes wiping the peanut butter off easier.

I took out the hard drive from my old apple computer. it is an maxtor Model # 5T060H6 60GB heard drive. I would like to use it as a external hard drive. I think this model is a Ultra-ATA. What type of external enclosure or dock or any way to access the Hard drive would you recommend.

I do not want to spend too much money because i already have a large external hard drive.

thank you

I believe the cheapest way would be to get a USB to IDE adapter and power supply.
See the link posted in the sources below.

I can’t sell the xbox, which is the obvious thing to do, even though I have no intention of ever putting it back together if I can use the hard drive. Please don’t even ask why. I have an empty external enclosure, but I don’t want to open up the xbox to see if it is compatible unless I know it will work. I assume someone has already done this and has the answer.

yep, its just a regular 5400rpm 3.5" drive in there

The problem is that the hard drive is actually from a external western digital hard drive 500gb My Book series, and its hard drive enclosure messed up. I don’t have any more warranty on it, so I was thinking of just buying a enclosure for the hard drive. I just don’t know which one to buy, and is compatible with Western Digital. Can someone please help me out.

The only thing you’ll need to know is what connection interface the drive has. Crack it open and look. It’ll have a connector with 4 large pins for power, and either a set of pins with a (usually grey) 2 inch wide cable sticking out, or a smaller cable about 1 inch wide. If it’s the wide cable get an external drive with IDE support, if ti’s the 1 inch wide cable then get a SATA compatible external drive. Pictures of both cables are easily found on images.google.com.

When my laptop broke down I transfered the hard drive into the enclosure thinking I would be able to get the data, but my new laptop wouldn’t recognise the hard drive. I thought maybe it was because there was 2 platforms or something. But my friends laptop broke down and I put his hard drive into the enclosure and it worked! it opened up as another drive and he was able to retrieve all his data.
the only difference that I can think off is in my hard drive I used a password to access my account; my friend never had a password.Any ideas on how to get my hard drive to open?
Will I have to boot it from the external drive at the beginning so I can sign in and remove the password?

See if perhaps your hard drive is configured as a Master drive; it is possible the old and new drives are both configured as Master and therefore the one in the laptop is dominant.

I don’t know about laptop drives, but in regular PC drives, there is a jumper setting to make it a Master or a Slave. Check you drive for the jumpers.

I have a 320gb hard drive, and i need to find a near store location like walmart or radioshack..

You can order one online from Radioshack and they will ship it to your store for free pickup.

I have this Seagate hard drive(250gb, SATA, 3.5") from my old, broken computer , and I am trying to use this as an external drive for extra storage. However, I am not sure which one to get, a converter(Sata to usb or esata) or an enclosure with a fan, to connect the drive to my new computer. Any ideas??

If you’re going to connect that one drive and leave it connected, an enclosure. If you have a lot of drives and change which one is connected, a cable adapter. (The electronics are the same, but it makes more sense to keep the drive in an enclosure if you’re not going to keep swapping drives.)

i found an old maxtor diamondmax 21 200gb(i think its a discontinued model) hard drive from a computer I don’t use and want to make it into a external hard drive, but i have no clue what enclosure i need to get. can someone figure out what one and give me a link to it?

You need a 3.5 IDE Hard Drive Enclosure, you can get them cheap at Ebay, everywhere else they are pretty expensive. Something like this would work nicely

http://cgi.ebay.com/BLACK-3-5-USB-2-0-External-IDE-Hard-Drive-Enclosure_W0QQitemZ190263880520QQcmdZViewItem?hash=item190263880520&_trkparms=72%3A1234%7C39%3A1%7C66%3A2%7C65%3A12%7C240%3A1318&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14

http://cgi.ebay.com/3-5-External-HDD-Hard-Drive-Disk-Enclosure-USB-2-0-IDE_W0QQitemZ400005191516QQcmdZViewItem?hash=item400005191516&_trkparms=72%3A1234%7C39%3A1%7C66%3A2%7C65%3A12%7C240%3A1318&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14

Either of those would work perfectly and come with everything you need. Goodluck

I have a Firewire external hard drive (portable size) with a damaged port but I believe the drive itself is fine. I’m wondering if I can somehow crack it out of the enclosure it came with and put it into a new USB case. I imagine there would be a power issue of some sort but any expertise would be appreciated. Thanks!

More than likely it is a SATA hard drive. As long as the USB external hard drive enclosure you are going to use is SATA as well then you should be fine. You’ll know because it only plugs in one way.