Is it possible to disassemble a external hard drive and make it internal? Because my external hard drive is failing on me, and I have some important documents on it I would like recovered. Now I do already have two hard drives in my PC, will that matter?
Very much possible, but I wouldn't recommend it. If you open up the casing on the external you should pretty much see an internal HDD hooked up to some things to make it connect externally. Breaking the case open will void any warranty if you have one. Also you should make sure you have the type of HDD you want as it could be SATA and you may only have IDE. If you have both slots though (at least one open) then you should be ok. I should also ask, if by failing do you mean the power supply for the external is failing, or the drive doesn't seem to be spinning up...or something else? If it's the actual drive that's failing then you might have a problem, however if it's one of the other parts to the external then this could potentially help you get that info off of it.
By failing I mean even the the Drive is hooked up it doesn't show on my computer. Where the drive's light on it's casing usually goes green after a minute it stays red/orange. Also I have no warranty cause I got it on ebay.
No harm, in trying, and in the vast majority of these cases the enclosure is what breaks, not the hard drive inside. I'd think there'd be a good chance that the drive would work when attached inside your PC, as long as you have a spare port on your motherboard and cable to attach it. Just make sure your PC doesn't try to boot from that drive. It shouldn't, but if your PC does complain about not being able to find an operating system when you attach the new drive, go into the BIOS and change the priority of the hard drives (should be in advanced CMOS settings)
Ok Tuesday I try to experiment with the drive to see if it's compatible. Also is it possible just to buy another enclosure for the drive. I rather like having it separate from my computer.
