Help converting external HD to internal

[Guest]

I have an HP external personal media drive 2TB. I was wondering if it is possible to use it as an internal hard drive as my current hard drive only has 80g of space in total. Is there anyway to use it as an internal hard drive?

 

[ilikehwy40]

I have an HP external personal media drive 2TB. I was wondering if it is possible to use it as an internal hard drive as my current hard drive only has 80g of space in total. Is there anyway to use it as an internal hard drive?

I am not sure if the HP personal media drive has standard plugs inside, but if it does you can probably break the case and use the harddrive with normal SATA cable inside your desktop with a reformat.

You could also use clonezilla to copy the 80gig boot to the 2TB and expand it to take up more space, so you can boot from the 2TB and have more space on your C drive.
If your motherboard is too old you might not be able to see a 2TB drive (if you have SATA on the motherboard you should be good for 2TB).

Pull your 80gig out if you use clonezilla before you boot into 2TB windows, make sure it works, then re-format the 80gig to use it inside as a 2nd harddrive. 2 instals of the exact same windows messes up if they are both plugged in when you try to boot into one of them.

Dont break anything until you are sure your motherboard supports 2TB SATA drives, the drive in the HP personal media is a standard SATA, and ... that you dont want to ever use the external part again. (it may work if you are careful)

Also, if you use linux, you can instal it onto your 2TB external drive over USB. You just have to keep it plugged in and turned on all the time. I have heard of booting windows on USB, but I dont recommend it.

 

[fzabkar]

You could use a utility such as HD Sentinel to determine the model number of the HDD inside the enclosure. That should confirm whether it has a standard SATA interface.