help making external harddrive for my laptop...

[Maple50175]

Well I had a PC and my brother completly screwed it up. I took it all apart and I have the 40 gig harddrive. I have a question. I want to make it an external hard drive and I see those cases you can get on ebay. How can i set it up at a HD? I want to make it have ALL my music on it so i can get it off my laptop . If anyone knows how to do this let me know.

Since the HD does have stuff on it...

[b33rnut010]

you can get little IDE to USB external boxes.. just plug em in pretty much... i have one sitting right next to me with 42 gigs of music on it

[Maple50175]

Yeah thats what i was going to get but how can i clean off the HD completly so its empty?

[JDMAlex]

is this a cable you made to work , do you have the harddrive just sitting there?

static electricity??????

[Maple50175]

no no.. Im going to get one of those cases... for them. and use that. I just dont know how to do it all =) heh

[mrfreddio55]

if you wanna completely clear it off, you right click on the drive when its plugged in, and then click "format."

Dont do this unless you're 100% sure you want the hard drive to have NOTHING on it, and make sure you're formatting the right one too. Once its gone, its gone.

[bruno8747]

When you plug the hard drive into the computer it will detect it as what ever its called.....Then you go into my computer locate the usb external hard drive and right click it. Go down to format and hit start. And make sure that the case that you are getting can hold 2.5" hard drive.

[Sho Nuff]

Yeah thats what i was going to get but how can i clean off the HD completly so its empty?

format it

[accordaffair]

And if it's like illegal stuff you really need to get rid of, do the full format. Doing a quick format doesn't actually get rid of the data, it just tells the hard drive it can consider the disk blank.

[JDMAlex]

And if it's like illegal stuff you really need to get rid of, do the full format. Doing a quick format doesn't actually get rid of the data, it just tells the hard drive it can consider the disk blank.

dosent the goverment format there data 9 times over using diffrent methods?

any hardrive can be recoverd by data technitons and special tools (investagation) after even a full format.

i hate computers , they never do what you want without lots of trouble