Question on an internal HDD as an external enclosed HDD to her PC

fdm2000 · 01 Feb 2020

My daughter wants to use a new unused internal 1TB HDD as an external 1TB for storage purposes. She purchased the cable and portable enclosure to connect to her PC. The instructions are confusing. Apparently it needs to be initialized and formatted.
Can some knowledgeable member advise how to accomplish the initialization and formatting and advise whether she should initialize with MBR or Style GPT? She has a new Dell PC running Windows 10 OS with a 256 GB internal SSD.

Mary

Samuria · 01 Feb 2020

You create a partition gpt is best but either will do then format it and you may need after to assign it a drive letter all can be done with disk manager

Barman58 · 01 Feb 2020

First question is' as always, is the drive empty?

If there is nothing on the drive you can initialise with either MBR or GPT, the main reason for initialising with GPT is that MBR has a limit of two Terabytes capacity so anything larger than this would have to be partitioned.
You can then format the drive - if dealing only with windows hardware NTFS is specifically designed for Windows , and includes file level permission, (more of this below). Use fat32 for multisystem use as it can be read by more hardware types

If the drive has data on it that you wish to access from the new PC via a USB link to the Drive Case, you will havre to make the old data visible, to do this connect the drive and from the new system, after you set it up for the new user's ... ...

Due to the access rights mentioned above there is a procedure that is required to assign rights to the new user (even if you use exactly the same name for the admin or other type of user the system uses unique numerical codes so they need to be reset

right click on the assigned drive letter, ( this will be selected by windows when you connect the drive the New PC), chose the properties option and then the security tab Either set the Owner of the files as Your individual user, (which gives only the one user access) or Everyone, (which gives access to all and apply the rights (ensure that the option to apply to files and folders beneath the current location , cascade ), OK out of the Properties menu and let the system finish it's work

And it's all done

Samuria · 01 Feb 2020

If it's a PC why not put it in the PC?

NavyLCDR · 01 Feb 2020

Install the drive in the enclosure. Plug it into the computer, see what happens first, it may be easier than you think.

bobkn · 01 Feb 2020

NavyLCDR said:

Install the drive in the enclosure. Plug it into the computer, see what happens first, it may be easier than you think.

That's pretty much it.

If the drive has not been initialized, Windows will ask to do that, even if the drive is in an external enclosure. After the initialization, you'll still need to format the disk. I did that using Disk Management. The quick way to access that is to type Disk Management into the search box in the lower left corner of the screen.

Berton · 01 Feb 2020

Agree, initialize when prompted then use Disk Management to create a partition then format it. For storage I prefer a single partition.

fdm2000 · 02 Feb 2020

Many thanks to all responders: Samuria, NavyLCDR, bobkin and Berton for your assistance and advice.
Mary

Berton · 02 Feb 2020

You're welcome. A note: using the 3.5" Desktop or 2.5" Notebook drives work the same way in an External USB case, just the size makes the difference. The older 3.5" PATA/Parallel ATA drives have gone away but the difference from the SATA/Serial ATA is the data and power connections. The 2.5" Notebook PATA drive connections were also different.