Here's How I made my External USB Hard Disk

[subcreations]

Creating an external USB Hard Disk

With the prices of USB to IDE controllers as well as the prices of hard disks plummeting, it makes good sense to make an external drive to so you can take your data with you.

I just bought a Samsung 2.5" HDD and I bought a case with the USB electronics and cable for $5.00 on EBAY.

Since the Samsung drive was brand new and unformatted, plugging it into Windows XP resulted in the usual message but the drive was unaccessible and does not show up in My Computer.

I think there is some way to format these in Windows, but for me it was Linux to the Rescue.

I used 64 bit FC1 for this.

1. Assemble the device and plug the USB Cable into your (already running) Linux Box.

2. System Tools -> Hardware Browser -> Hard Drives In my case this was displayed as /dev/sdb

3. Type fdisk /dev/sdb

Remain in fdisk and do the following:

a. You need to add a new partition so type n
b. Make it a primary. Press p
c. Make it the 1st partition. Press 1
d. Use the defaults to create one big hard disk. Press enter twice
e. You need to change the partition's system id so type t
f. To see the list of codes type L
g. To select vfat, press c
h. Now write the changes to disk. Press w

4. Now, create the file system. Type mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdb1

Now you can put it in your XP box and give it a name

If anybody knows how to do this in Windows, please post.

Dave

[AlexK]

right click on the drive in explorer and select format drive. in the little box which pops up, select fat32. Then click start.

the above method seems simpler, but i prefer to do it your way as i know exactly how the drive is going to be partitioned and i can have the option of having different file systems on the one drive.