Can an External Hard drive be a hard drive?

[nwa_compton]

Basically I built a new rig and I'm going to have my old one hooked up to my tv. The thing is I didn't upgrade my HDD so I took it out of my old rig put it in my new rig and reformated. I bought a 1tb external drive to back up my old files. I was wondering if there is anyway to use the external drive as a hard drive for my old rig?

Thanks in advance

 

[HVDynamo]

I am assuming that you want to use it as a boot drive. I highly recommend against this, and it would be a pain to set up, and in some cases won't even work. You could take the hard drive out of the external and mount it inside the computer, but Hard drives aren't that expensive, I would just buy a new one.

 

[Chicano]

Basically I built a new rig and I'm going to have my old one hooked up to my tv. The thing is I didn't upgrade my HDD so I took it out of my old rig put it in my new rig and reformated. I bought a 1tb external drive to back up my old files. I was wondering if there is anyway to use the external drive as a hard drive for my old rig?

Thanks in advance

I don't see why it can't be done... (why it wold be a pain or why it wouldn't even work). External USB hard drives are ordinary hard drives in external enclosures but they can be removed and used like any other hard drive. The only possible problems I can think of are:

1. If it's a SATA Hard Drive and you old computer is all IDE... but in that case you can buy a IDE adapter for a SATA hard drive, or a PCI to SATA adapter.. either is very inexpensive.
2. Or if it's a 2.5" laptop Hard Drive but even that can be done: If it's SATA 2.5" HD it can be connected to SATA PC motherboard data and power connectors. If it's 2.5" IDE HD, you can find adapters for IDE PC motherboard data and power. They even make floppy bay brakets to adapt laptop hard drives.

The first thing to do would be to partition it with a Partition Manager such as Minitool Partition Manager while it's in the enclosure, making sure to move the partition that contains the files to the right (or last partition), next format the first partition and make it the HD's active (or boot) partition (you can activate the first partition on each hard drive)... remove the HD from the enclosure and install in the old computer and install the OS.