External HD formatting..?

Question

OK let me try this agian, My desktop pc's motherboard went kuput. so i had them remove the HD w/ xp on it and put it in a external enclosure. I hav a laptop w/ ME on it and am trying to use them together. I do not want to reformat the external w/ xp on it because it has everything on it,,pics music ect...can i not use them together??

I tried and its in my computer as E drive but i wants to format it.

Answer 1

As I said in my previous post (maybe you missed it), the reason you can't use the Windows XP drive on the laptop with ME is because the Windows XP drive was most likely formatted as NTFS. Windows ME will not recognize the NTFS format. Only Windows 2000 and Windows XP will recognize a NTFS formatted drive and they will also recognize FAT formatted drives as well. Most people are using Windows XP anyway so this really isn't an issue for most. In your situation, well, you'll have to get access to a machine that has Windows 2000 or XP on it, otherwise... you won't be able to access the data from Windows 98 or ME. Sorry but that's just the way it is.

Answer 2

Hi,

I am very sorry to say that there is no way to connect the Desktop HDD to a LAPTOP.

So, what u may do is that u may connect this HDD to another Desk top and then using a USB cable transfer the data to u re Laptop. Or in case the latter Desktop has a writer u may write data in a CD.

All the best !

Nikhil Chowdhary
Technical Support Expert
DELL INTERNATIONAL SERVICES,

Answer 3

Yeah, you should be able to use them fine. There's no need to format your external harddrive, just connect it to the laptop and it should show up as a new device in My Computer. Or are you saying you already tried this and it didn't work?

Answer 4

There is a way for you to put the HD into a box with USB cable connected to ur laptop. So you can see the HD on your laptop as a new device.