Transforming external hard drive in internal hard drive

[PedroPereira]

Hi,


I just finished building my new pc and thought it would be cool to transform my 1tb iomega external drive in an internal disc drive. The external drive proved to be 2x 500GB drives, anyway i connected them to my motherboard and booted my pc.

The problem is that after windows only detects 1 drive and when i double click it asks me if i want to format the drive. Because i have the discs almost full i don't want it so i tried to see if it was a file system problem and found out if i run a dos convert command to change to ntfs i get a message "convert command is not available for RAW drives".

Is it possible to get the drives running in my desktop without formating them?

 

[Paperdoc]

I would suggest you stop right now!

If the external drive unit actually contained TWO HDD's, but appears to be only one, then there is some special arrangement in the Iomega unit's handling of the two HDD's. The most likely is that they are in a RAID array - could be either RAID0 or RAID1, but RAID0 is definitely more likely based on no further info. The other possibility is a JBOD arrangement. For ANY of these possibilities, the exact way the data are stored and retrieved on those two HDD units is determined by the controller inside the Iomega box. It is VERY unlikely that the controller system in your new PC would do it the same way. That is why your system is telling you that the HDD's have a RAW Format - that is the message Windows tells you when it cannot understand the data structures on the HDD.

If you continue to work on those HDD units with the wrong controller, you are very likely to write info to them that will destroy any easy way to access their data, and you may never get it back - unless you start paying big bucks to a data recovery service.

BUT the easy way out of this is to put those HDD's back into the Iomega case. That case DOES have the right controllers and array management software to read them just as they were written. I really suggest you hook this unit back up to your OLD computer that has the appropriate driver installed. You should be able to read them. HOWEVER, there is one important thing you must do in returning them to their original case. IF you have any info on which HDD was in which slot inside the case, be SURE to replace them in exactly the same original positions. If that is not possible, be very careful. Put them in, hook the Iomega unit to your computer, and see if it can be read. READ ONLY - do not write to it. If it does not work right away, you can shut down, disconnect and try swapping the two drives inside the case into the opposite slots. See if that works.

Once you can read your old Iomega unit, COPY all your data off to another standard HDD. IF you have one you can mount temporarily in your old machine, you can do his job there. Otherwise, if you have the Iomega unit working OK, you could connect it to your new machine, install the required driver(s), and do the copying stuff there. AFTER you have all your old files copied safely to another place, you can go back to your original plan.

If you do proceed with converting your old Iomega's two HDD's into separate units inside the new computer, you will have to Partition and Format each of them after they are mounted. These operations will most certainly destroy all their old data and get them set up for use as new empty HDD's. That is why you MUST copy their data off to a safe place before proceeding.

 

[PedroPereira]

Didn't thought about the raid part.... I have started doing my back ups and will format those drives later.


Thank you for the help

 

[Alabalcho]

Didn't thought about the raid part.... I have started doing my back ups and will format those drives later.


Thank you for the help

Another thing to consider - external drives are usualy SLOW (they are made slow on purpose, to be cold and silent), so making either of these a boot drive is not the best idea either.

 

[PedroPereira]

Another thing to consider - external drives are usualy SLOW (they are made slow on purpose, to be cold and silent), so making either of these a boot drive is not the best idea either.

I bought a SSD to have as a boot drive

Thinking about it if the external drives are slow will they have any impact on game performance if i install the games there?