Making an External Hard drive bootable

DIY-Computer-Repair can help!

These procedures require you to open your external hard drive enclosure to make the drive inside bootable. This will void your warranty if it is still in effect.*

First: is this a SATA or USB connected drive. USB read on, SATA go to the  page: Partition and format a hard drive

Disconnect power adapter and USB cable. You will need to have the following items available before continuing:

If this is a  2.5 drive you will need a IDE adapter that will reduce the size of the pin connectors from the normal 80 Pin IDE cable to the 3.5/2.5 80 Pin cable. Your local electronics store may have them or you can find them on the computer parts web pages.

You can use either a desktop or a laptop computer. If you use a laptop computer the drive has to be the same size as the one in the computer, do not insert a 2.5 drive into a 3.5 inch drive bay, you will mess up the connector pins!

If you do have a different size drive in the laptop vs. the external drive then your only choice is to use a desktop.

This may seem like a lot of work but the only way you can partition and format the drive is through the IDE or SATA interface and not the USB connector.

Open the drive enclosure, remove the drive from the enclosure and install it in your desktop or laptop.

Go to the  page. Partition and format a hard drive

When the drive is bootable and you have the files you need on the drive then reverse the removal procedure to put the drive back into the enclosure.

Test:

It is important that you test you work, one to insure the drive will function and that it will start the computer, to do this with a normal desktop you can either disconnect the power or interface cable or disable the boot drive in the BIOS settings.

With a laptop you can test your external drive either by selecting it at boot up (when the laptop boots you have a keystroke that will get into the boot device menu) or leaving the internal hard drive out when you complete the procedure.

*As I pointed out at the top of this article you may void your warranty if you remove the drive from the enclosure. I do not take any responsibility for any of these instructions use at your own risk.

2.5 INCH EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE ENCLOSURE W/PUSHBUTTON BACKUP

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