Moving External Hard Drive to Internal

[theaudiophreak]

I have a hard drive, a Western Digital Caviar 300 GB, that I was using
in an external drive kit. I've got it more than half full, about 180
GB, of backups that I don't want to lose. I had another external, but
since I carry them around a lot, it eventually was detroyed by a
serious drop and I lost all my data. I'd like to keep that from
happening again, so what I want to do is take that external drive, and
put it into a file storage tower (running XP) as a slave drive. No
RAID arrays or anything (yet) just a master and slave on a single IDE
ribbon.

Here's the issue: When I hook it up to my file server, all that XP sees
is a 120 GB space of unformatted nothingness. Attempting to access the
drive brings up a prompt to format it.

If I had the extra space anywhere else, I'd copy everything off the
drive, reformat it, copy it back, and be on my merry way, but I don't
have that kind of room on any drive and DVDs are too pricey to be using
so many.

I thought the file system might have been the issue; the external drive
was formatted NTFS and the master drive on the file server was FAT32.
I converted the data on the FAT32 drive to NTFS and still nothing.

I had the drive set to master when it was being used as an external,
and now it's set to slave. I don't think that would have any impact,
but I don't know for sure.

So can this be done without losing all my data, or do I have to leave
it as an external?

Thanks in advance
~Dan Hansen

 

[GHalleck]

I have a hard drive, a Western Digital Caviar 300 GB, that I was using
in an external drive kit. I've got it more than half full, about 180
GB, of backups that I don't want to lose. I had another external, but
since I carry them around a lot, it eventually was detroyed by a
serious drop and I lost all my data. I'd like to keep that from
happening again, so what I want to do is take that external drive, and
put it into a file storage tower (running XP) as a slave drive. No
RAID arrays or anything (yet) just a master and slave on a single IDE
ribbon.

Here's the issue: When I hook it up to my file server, all that XP sees
is a 120 GB space of unformatted nothingness. Attempting to access the
drive brings up a prompt to format it.

If I had the extra space anywhere else, I'd copy everything off the
drive, reformat it, copy it back, and be on my merry way, but I don't
have that kind of room on any drive and DVDs are too pricey to be using
so many.

I thought the file system might have been the issue; the external drive
was formatted NTFS and the master drive on the file server was FAT32.
I converted the data on the FAT32 drive to NTFS and still nothing.

I had the drive set to master when it was being used as an external,
and now it's set to slave. I don't think that would have any impact,
but I don't know for sure.

So can this be done without losing all my data, or do I have to leave
it as an external?

Thanks in advance
~Dan Hansen

Most people would probably have bought another hard drive
and installed it in the server and set it up as a slave.
Without taking apart the external hard drive, most people
would most likely copy the files from it to the new HD and
not go through the shenanigans described above. Of course,
to install a large HD (greater than 137 GB), the computer's
bios would need to be able to see it. Windows XP SP2 is also
needed.

 

[Jonny]

I have a hard drive, a Western Digital Caviar 300 GB, that I was using
in an external drive kit. I've got it more than half full, about 180
GB, of backups that I don't want to lose. I had another external, but
since I carry them around a lot, it eventually was detroyed by a
serious drop and I lost all my data. I'd like to keep that from
happening again, so what I want to do is take that external drive, and
put it into a file storage tower (running XP) as a slave drive. No
RAID arrays or anything (yet) just a master and slave on a single IDE
ribbon.

Here's the issue: When I hook it up to my file server, all that XP sees
is a 120 GB space of unformatted nothingness. Attempting to access the
drive brings up a prompt to format it.

If I had the extra space anywhere else, I'd copy everything off the
drive, reformat it, copy it back, and be on my merry way, but I don't
have that kind of room on any drive and DVDs are too pricey to be using
so many.

I thought the file system might have been the issue; the external drive
was formatted NTFS and the master drive on the file server was FAT32.
I converted the data on the FAT32 drive to NTFS and still nothing.

I had the drive set to master when it was being used as an external,
and now it's set to slave. I don't think that would have any impact,
but I don't know for sure.

So can this be done without losing all my data, or do I have to leave
it as an external?

Thanks in advance
~Dan Hansen

Get you another 300GB WD, install it internally, partition and format from
disk manager. Connect the former 300GB as an external. Copy folders and
files over to the internal drive.
You can either keep the old external for intermittent backups of the onboard
version, or wipe it and sell it.

 

[theaudiophreak]

Most people would probably have bought another hard drive
and installed it in the server and set it up as a slave.
Without taking apart the external hard drive, most people
would most likely copy the files from it to the new HD and
not go through the shenanigans described above. Of course,
to install a large HD (greater than 137 GB), the computer's
bios would need to be able to see it. Windows XP SP2 is also
needed.

Hah, I missed something pretty simple there. I upgraded to service
pack 2 and viola. Thanks for the help.