How to assemble a USB portable hard drive?

Step 1. Preparation

Before start, check that you have got all the following ready: USB 2.5" hard drive enclosure ; slim 2.5" laptop hard drive (shown as (b) in Picture I); and screw driver of proper size. The 2.5" hard drive caddy is actually composed of two parts, the aluminium shell (shown as (a1) in Picture I) and the printing circuit board (PCB) (shown as (a2) in picture I)

Step 2. Assemling

I. Take out the hard drive and the USB enclosure, place the aluminum shell (a1), hard drive (b), and the PCB (a2) in a straight line, with printed / label side facing upward, shown in Picture II
II. Connect the 2.5" laptop hard drive to the interface of the PCB (Picture II), then push the assembly into the aluminum shell (Picture III); if the assembly can not be pushed inside, then the connection between the interface and the hard drive is wrong.
III. Fix the screws at the sides of the enclosure(Picture IV). Congratulations, you have sucessfully made a portable hard drive!

Step 3. Partition & Format the portable hard drive:

If the computer have sucessfully recognised the portable hard drive, but it is not listed in "My Computer", then you need to creat partition and format the hard drive. This step is exactly the same as if a new hard drive is fixed inside a computer, and the USB makes this step possible to be accomplished under Windows, a great news for those users who hate DOS.

If the hard drive is new, it must be DOS partitioned before the drive hard can appear in "My computer" as a new driver (as E:), and this new driver (as E:) must be formatted before it can stored any data.

Step 3.1 Partition & Format the portable hard drive in Windows 2000 & Windows XP

Go to "Control Panel" --> "Administrative Tools" -->"Computer Management" -->"Disk Management", in Windows XP, the computer will automatically start initialize the new hard drive, just click "Next" to follow. Now you will see your new hard drive listed as "Disk 1" (as "Disk 2" if you have two internal hard drives; or as "Disk 3" if you have three internal hard drives). In Windows 2000, you need to right click on "Disk 1" (the new hard drive), then select "write signature".

Now right click on the black bar corresponding to the new hard drive, select the "Create partition", and follow the screem intructions to do the partitioning and formatting.

Step 3.2 Partition & Format the portable hard drive in Windows 98

In Windows 98/, you need to click "Start" --> Run "Fdisk", choose option 5, then 1, then 1, after this completed, a new driver letter (such as E:) will be assigned to USB hard drive.

Then run "Format E:" (please note E: is the new driver letter assigned!), when this completed, you can see the volume of the drive in Windows Explorer, and it is ready to store data.

Specifications:

Click here - portable hard drive - for specifications

FAQ-USB hard drives