Adding an external hard drive the EASY way would be to just buy an external HD and attach it to a USB port (or Firewire, but these days it's mostly USB 2.0).

The hard way ... buy your own enclosure and HD, hook them up and attach it to a USB port.

Doesn't sound THAT hard. But in my case ...

I found a Maxtor 300 GB HD on sale (with rebate) for $89.99. I found a nice looking aluminum external enclosure for about $30. I also received a rebate of 4% from one of my rebate sites (MrRebates or Fatwallet, can't recall which). Or I could have purchased a 250 GB HD for $149 + tax. I'd never tried this before (I'd hooked up new internal drives, though) so I thought it would be easy.

Well, first thing I did after getting the parts was was hook up the drive to the real hardware of the enclosure ... the part that had the USB hardware + the power connection and IDE port ... and I noticed the HD was making a clunking noise when I powered it up. Uh, oh.

Connected it, and as I figured, nothing. HD was bad. Sigh. Returned it (they gave me a credit of $8 for shipping and it cost me $7.80 for shipping and insurance ... whew).

All right, just got the new HD. Hooked it up. No clunking. Put things together. Oops, I screwed everything in but did not put the panel on top (side) of the enclosure. Unscrew things. Let's try it again.

All right, connect it to the PC. It's recognized. Open up Windows Explorer. Hey, where is it?!

I figured I knew what it was, but I wasn't 100%. I opened up the Disk Manager (Start, Settings, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management). I could see the drive, but no drive letter and no partition. Figured it was the partition that was missing that was screwing it up.


Well, I'd never partitioned a HD in XP. I actually had to look it up. I used the DiskPart command line tool ... didn't even know about this. After partitioning it using the a) List Disk, b) Select Disk (2 in this case), Create Primary Partition commands, I could see in Disk Management that the partition was there, but still no drive letter.

Right clicked on it ... and viola, I could NOW select a drive letter.

Now all I have to do is format it ... then comes the fun part ... hooking it up to the Linksys NSLU2 NAS device I have already purchased. I might wait until tomorrow for that one!