Convert flash drive to hard drive. Can a hard drive be used as a flash drive?

Introduction.
Most laptop owners sooner or later face the problem of lack of space on. As a rule, laptops up to and including 15 inches do not have a free second slot for a 2.5 inch device. Therefore, owners are forced to think about either replacing the laptop itself, or replacing its hard drive. After replacing the hard drive, there is always an old drive that can be easily turned into an external USB drive for data transfer.
Naturally, you can purchase a mobile 2.5 inch HDD and turn it into an external drive. Fortunately, the cost of external drives allows this. For example, at the time of writing, a 250 GB mobile hard drive costs $40, while a 500 GB device from WD costs only $45.
Decide on the type of hard drive.
In fairness, it should be noted that an ordinary desktop 3.5-inch hard drive can also be turned into an external drive - you just can’t call it mobile anymore. If you have an unused 2.5 or 3.5 inch hard drive, then first of all you need to determine the type of its interface.
To date, the following interface types exist on the market: IDE (ATA) and various SATA options. As a rule, all SATA interfaces are backward compatible with each other, and we will not dwell on their variations. The situation is completely different between IDE and SATA interfaces, which are absolutely incompatible with each other and have different connectors.

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The figure shows two hard drives with different interfaces. Winchesters have a mobile format of 2.5 inches. On the left is a hard drive with a SATA interface, on the right is a hard drive with an IDE interface.

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In our hands was a 250 GB hard drive from Western Digital of the Scorpio Blue series with a SATA interface. This drive has been in use for a long time. Acer laptop, but its capacity was not enough, and it was replaced by a more capacious 500 GB solution.

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As a rule, various cases with USB 2.0 interface are presented in stores, there are much fewer cases with eSATA interface, even fewer cases with their combination USB 2.0 & eSATA. Several cases with a modern USB 3.0 interface were found on sale, but their cost exceeded the cost of the hard drive itself, so we did not consider them.

The key difference between USB 2.0 and eSATA is the transfer speed. Using the USB 2.0 interface allows for maximum compatibility, as these ports are available on all computers. A significant disadvantage of the USB 2.0 interface is the low data transfer rate, which will not allow you to unlock the full speed potential of your hard drive.

The eSATA port is more promising, but it is not common and is found only in expensive versions of motherboards, cases and laptops. The eSATA interface allows you to fully unlock the potential of SATA devices.

The material of manufacture can also be very different. Simply put, it's plastic. In more expensive variations, an aluminum case with a leather case is included.
The cost of external cases also varies. The cheapest option will cost the user 3 dollars, expensive versions will cost more than 100 dollars.

Purchasing a $100 case for a hard drive that costs less than $40 when new and is half the price once it's in use is wasteful to say the least. Therefore, for testing, we were given a case worth a symbolic 3 dollars - AgeStar SUB2P1. Completion and external inspection AgeStar SUB2P1.

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From a device worth three dollars, we did not expect any miracles, both in terms of equipment and in terms of performance. The device comes modestly packaged in a package. The front wall of the device is covered by a cardboard box listing the key characteristics of the device. It is support for 2.5 inch mobile hard drives or solid state drives with SATA interface, USB 2.0 data transfer interface and various color options.
In fairness, it should be noted that our suppliers have confirmed that they have not seen any other than the black color of this case.

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After opening the package, we were pleasantly surprised by the fact that the set includes an instruction manual completely in Russian.

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The case is completely made of plastic. There are paper stickers on the front wall indicating the model, which will be erased in any case, so we recommend that you immediately remove them from the surface of the device.

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The material of the case is soft black plastic, which does not smell anything, is uniform throughout its structure.

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The covers of the device come off in two different directions, which makes it easy to remove and install the hard drive in an external case.

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The two sides of the outer case are fixed with a plastic latch made from the material of the case. Thanks to the recesses on the walls, the lids are securely fixed and spilling a glass of liquid, or leaving the device in the rain, is unlikely to lead to any problems.

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The device is designed for SATA hard drives, which we have repeatedly emphasized. Inside soldered controllers with SATA ports for power and data transfer.

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On the side wall there is a mini USB port for data transfer and hard drive power supply. There is no additional port to provide power to the drive, which may cause some problems for users. With a weak power supply that lowers the voltage along the 5 volt line, you often have to deal with problems starting the hard drive. As a rule, connecting the drive directly to the port on the motherboard, and not on the case system block, the use of a high-quality USB cable allows you to forget about this problem.

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Sellers of computer components often talk about the presence of a USB data cable in the kit as an advantage of one or another external case or offer to purchase it separately if it is not. We advise our users not to pay attention to this, as a mini-USB-to-USB cable is usually found in almost every family and is often supplied with mobile phones. In our case, we successfully applied a stale data cable from mobile phone Nokia.

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The next step is to install the hard drive in the case. This is done quite simply - by light pressing. Most importantly, first rotate the hard drive correctly according to the SATA power and data ports located in the case.

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The absence of any protruding elements on the hard drive controller circuit allows you not to worry about its rear surface when transporting and using the device.

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Some users may argue that the plastic case does not provide adequate heat dissipation from the hard drive. Naturally, external cases made of aluminum cope with this task much more effectively. At the same time, we should not forget that mobile hard drives do not have such a high power consumption to suffer from overheating, and in laptops, as a rule, they are not cooled by anything else.

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After the assembly of the device is completed, the stage of its testing and use begins. The power supply to the device is accompanied by the glow of the blue LED, which also symbolizes the user about the data transfer process. It should be noted that not everyone will have a smooth start with the created external drive. If the hard drive has already been used, it has been formatted and partitions have been created on it, you will not have problems getting started. It will be defined as a regular USB flash drive using the Plug & Play method. But for those users who have purchased a new hard drive without formatting and with no partitions, there will be a problem that will be associated with the absence of a drive letter in the "My Computer" tab.
To do this, you need to create partitions on the hard drive and format it. This can be done through various boot disks, but it's better not to bother and do it in the Windows operating system itself.

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To do this, you need to go to the "Control Panel" through the "Start" section, then visit the "Administrative Tools" section. In this section, select "Computer Management", where in the "Disk Management" tab you can partition and format the newly connected external drive. After creating partitions, formatting them, you will have access to them through the "My Computer" tab and you will be able to exchange with the drive, as with a regular hard drive. Test configuration.
The assembled external drive was tested both on a desktop computer, based on a modern Core i7 processor and no less modern motherboard as well as on a laptop Acer Aspire 7730 based on Core 2 Duo processor. It should be noted that the level of performance on two different systems turned out to be comparable equal.

1. Data reading speed was tested in HD Tach 3.0.4.0

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It's nice to note that the external drive we assembled shows a much higher level of performance than the WD My Passport Essential external hard drive we tested earlier. The maximum data transfer rate was 34.3 Mb / s, and the average delay was about 17.9 ms.

2. Data reading speed in HD Tune 4.5.

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In the second synthetic test, we got similar data to the previous ones, which also turned out to be slightly better than that of the official WD My Passport Essential external hard drive.

3. The speed of writing files of 64 MB in HD Tune 4.5.

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Somewhat more valuable is testing close to practice, by writing 64 MB files. In this test, we got quite expected results, which were also limited only by the capabilities of the USB 2.0 interface.
Separately, I would like to note that during the entire testing, the temperature of the hard drive did not exceed 35 degrees Celsius, while a similar hard drive installed in a laptop had a temperature of about 43 degrees. Therefore, users will not need to worry about the working conditions of the hard drive in this case.

4. Operating download speed Windows systems 7.

During practical testing on image loading speed operating system In Windows 7, we got similar results for other USB 2.0 external drives.

5. Drive performance evaluation in Windows 7 environment.

We tested the performance of the external drive we assembled using the Windows 7 operating system. To do this, you need to call the command in the command line: "winsat disk -drive g -ran -write -count 10", where "g" is the letter of the drive under test in the system.

From the test results, it can be seen that the drive we assembled received a much higher rating than the factory WD My Passport Essential solution. Conclusion.
According to the materials of this article, it is clear that any mobile hard drive can be turned into a good external drive without any hassle. Especially for testing, we asked to provide us with the cheapest external case, worth $ 3. Three dollars allows you to get an excellent external drive from a mobile hard drive, at least for data storage. Not to mention the fact that the same external case facilitates the recovery of data from the hard drive of "dead" laptops.

Despite the fact that AgeStar products are criticized by many for their low quality, after many years of using it, I have only a positive impression of it. First of all, it is for a democratic cost. Marriage occurs in all manufacturers, even if AgeStar has a slightly higher figure than Thermaltake. But the latter has no analogue to the presented external case for three dollars and with a guarantee of 6 months. We award AgeStar products with a gold medal for the best performance/price ratio.

Admin 15.06.2014 - 10:13 Tips

Today, the cost of USB flash drives is still quite high. And a drive with a capacity of 128 gigabytes will cost the user approximately 5,000 rubles. In comparison, a 500 GB hard drive (form factor 2.5”) will cost in the range of 1500 - 2500 rubles! Naturally, the preferred purchase will be the purchase of an external hard drive, or its independent configuration ...

How to build an external hard drive?

The benefit of self-configuring the device is obvious. This is not only an individual selection of external and specifications, but also the opportunity to save money using an existing hard drive.

So in the situation described below, we managed to get by with “little blood”. There is a hard drive - 320 gigabytes, removed from the laptop due to replacement with a larger device. We buy to him a "box for hard drives”(case, pocket, etc.), which costs quite inexpensively, from two hundred rubles and more. This is followed by the assembly process, which takes 5 to 10 minutes.

If you are unsure of the success of self-equipment, then you should contact the experts. For example, inquire about the possibility of assembly at the place of purchase, or trust service center.

Steps for building an external hard drive:

Connecting the drive to a computer:

We connect the resulting drive to the computer using the USB cable supplied with the box. One end (micro-USB) is inserted into the corresponding connector on the box panel, and one (or two) into the free USB ports of your PC;

If the hard drive used in the drive was previously installed in the laptop, as in our case, then the installation will not require any additional steps. Operating systems of the Windows family older than XP version automatically recognize controllers of this type. If you completed the drive with a new hard drive, then you will need to at least format it (often, no additional steps are required, since the factory hard drive is ready for use after connection).

Most models of boxes for external hard drives are equipped with an indication marked as "LED" (it can display the connection - constant light, or intermittent - reading and writing information). Besides the boxing panel can have additional functionality. In our case, this is the “Backup” button, designed to launch Reserve copy specified directories or files (when installed software).

P.S.

That's all, it took no more than 15 minutes to start copying the data to the assembled disk. I hope you managed to assemble your external hard drive with a minimum of time and effort.

updated: 06/25/2016

External storage do it yourself. USB drive from a laptop hard drive.

Introduction. Most laptop owners sooner or later face the problem of lack of hard drive space. As a rule, laptops up to and including 15 inches do not have a free second slot for a 2.5 inch device. Therefore, owners are forced to think about either replacing the laptop itself, or replacing its hard drive. After replacing the hard drive, there is always an old drive that can be easily turned into an external USB drive for data transfer. Naturally, you can purchase a mobile 2.5-inch hard drive and turn it into an external drive. Fortunately, the cost of external drives allows this. For example, at the time of writing, a 250 GB mobile hard drive costs $40, while a 500 GB device from WD costs only $45.

Decide on the type of hard drive.

In fairness, it should be noted that an ordinary desktop 3.5-inch hard drive can also be turned into an external drive - you just can’t call it mobile anymore. If you have an unused 2.5 or 3.5 inch hard drive, then first of all you need to determine the type of its interface.

To date, the following interface types exist on the market: IDE (ATA) and various SATA options. As a rule, all SATA interfaces are backward compatible with each other, and we will not dwell on their variations. The situation is completely different between IDE and SATA interfaces, which are absolutely incompatible with each other and have different connectors.

Image is clickable --

In our hands was a 250 GB hard drive from Western Digital of the Scorpio Blue series with a SATA interface. This drive was used in an Acer laptop for a long time, but its capacity was not enough, and it was replaced with a more capacious 500 GB solution.

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Despite long-term use, the hard drive did not cause any complaints, so it was decided to use it as an external mobile drive. To do this, it was necessary to find an external case for him, which we did. External case AGESTAR for 2.5 inch mobile hard drive. Computer hardware stores offer a wide variety of external cases for 2.5 inch hard drives. Their key difference lies in the following: - case material, - type of external port (interface), - cost. As a rule, various cases with USB 2.0 interface are presented in stores, there are much fewer cases with eSATA interface, even fewer cases with their combination USB 2.0 & eSATA. Several cases with a modern USB 3.0 interface were found on sale, but their cost exceeded the cost of the hard drive itself, so we did not consider them. The key difference between USB 2.0 and eSATA is the transfer speed. Using the USB 2.0 interface allows for maximum compatibility, as these ports are available on all computers. A significant disadvantage of the USB 2.0 interface is the low data transfer rate, which will not allow you to unlock the full speed potential of your hard drive. The eSATA port is more promising, but it is not common and is found only in expensive versions of motherboards, cases and laptops. The eSATA interface allows you to fully unlock the potential of SATA devices. The material of manufacture can also be very different. Simply put, it's plastic. In more expensive variations, an aluminum case with a leather case is included. The cost of external cases also varies. The cheapest option will cost the user 3 dollars, expensive versions will cost more than 100 dollars.

Completion and external inspection AgeStar SUB2P1.

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From a device worth three dollars, we did not expect any miracles, both in terms of equipment and in terms of performance. The device comes modestly packaged in a package. The front wall of the device is covered by a cardboard box listing the key characteristics of the device. This is support for 2.5 inch mobile hard drives or solid state drives with a SATA interface, the availability of a USB 2.0 data transfer interface and various color options.

In fairness, it should be noted that our suppliers have confirmed that they have not seen any other than the black color of this case.

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After opening the package, we were pleasantly surprised by the fact that the set includes an instruction manual completely in Russian.

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The material of the case is soft black plastic, which does not smell anything, is uniform throughout its structure.

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The covers of the device come off in two different directions, which makes it easy to remove and install the hard drive in an external case.

Image is clickable --

The device is designed for SATA hard drives, which we have repeatedly emphasized. Inside soldered controllers with SATA ports for power and data transfer.

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On the side wall there is a mini USB port for data transfer and hard drive power supply. There is no additional port to provide power to the drive, which may cause some problems for users. With a weak power supply that lowers the voltage along the 5 volt line, you often have to deal with problems starting the hard drive. As a rule, connecting the drive directly to the port on the motherboard, and not on the case of the system unit, using a high-quality USB cable allows you to forget about this problem.

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The absence of any protruding elements on the hard drive controller circuit allows you not to worry about its rear surface when transporting and using the device.

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To do this, you need to create partitions on the hard drive and format it. This can be done through various boot disks, but it's better not to bother and do it in the Windows operating system itself.

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To do this, you need to go to the "Control Panel" through the "Start" section, then visit the "Administrative Tools" section. In this section, select "Computer Management", where in the "Disk Management" tab you can partition and format the newly connected external drive. After creating partitions, formatting them, you will have access to them through the "My Computer" tab and you will be able to exchange with the drive, as with a regular hard drive. Test configuration. The assembled external drive was tested both on a desktop computer based on a modern Core i7 processor and no less modern motherboard, and on an Acer Aspire 7730 laptop based on a Core 2 Duo processor. It should be noted that the level of performance on two different systems turned out to be comparable equal.

1. Data reading speed was tested in HD Tach 3.0.4.0

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2. Data reading speed in HD Tune 4.5.

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In the second synthetic test, we got similar data to the previous ones, which also turned out to be slightly better than that of the official WD My Passport Essential external hard drive.

3. The speed of writing files of 64 MB in HD Tune 4.5.

Image is clickable --

Somewhat more valuable is testing close to practice, by writing 64 MB files. In this test, we got quite expected results, which were also limited only by the capabilities of the USB 2.0 interface. Separately, I would like to note that during the entire testing, the temperature of the hard drive did not exceed 35 degrees Celsius, while a similar hard drive installed in a laptop had a temperature of about 43 degrees. Therefore, users will not need to worry about the working conditions of the hard drive in this case.

4. The speed of loading the Windows 7 operating system.

In the course of practical testing on the boot speed of the Windows 7 operating system image, we received results similar to other external drives with a USB 2.0 interface.

5. Drive performance evaluation in Windows 7 environment.

From the test results, it can be seen that the drive we assembled received a much higher rating than the factory WD My Passport Essential solution.

Conclusion. According to the materials of this article, it is clear that any mobile hard drive can be turned into a good external drive without any hassle. Especially for testing, we asked to provide us with the cheapest external case, worth $ 3. Three dollars allows you to get an excellent external drive from a mobile hard drive, at least for data storage. Not to mention the fact that the same external case facilitates the recovery of data from the hard drive of "dead" laptops.

www.megaobzor.com

Turning a USB flash drive into a hard drive

Any flash drive can be easily turned from the point of view of Windows into a natural hard drive. That is, for the operating system, a USB flash drive will be perceived as a regular, fixed disk, and not as an external portable device. Why might this be needed?

This technique is described primarily for those who want to prepare a flash drive for Windows installation 7 from Windows XP using the DISKPART utility. The whole problem is that in Windows XP the DISKPART utility does not see the USB flash drive point-blank at all. At least enter the list disk command for DISKPART a hundred times, it is useless: as a result, we will be shown only available hard drives and nothing more.

Therefore, from Windows XP using DISKPART it is generally impossible to do bootable flash drive with Windows 7.

However, what happiness - this problem can be solved in a tricky way. Namely: we will turn the flash drive into a regular fixed disk. In other words, for Windows XP, the flash drive will become another hard drive. And then DISKPART will show the disk we need as a pretty one. Cool? Still would!

Such a transformation of a flash drive will be useful to you for other purposes, wherever instead of a removable hard drive you're thinking of using a flash drive.

By the way, are you wondering why the hell DISKPART does not display a USB flash drive at all? It's all about the RMB (removable media bit) descriptor written on each flash drive. It is because of him that Windows XP (and other Windows versions) perceive the flash drive as a plug-in device (i.e. removable device). It is enough to remove this descriptor and the flash drive will mutate into a hard disk, it will be displayed as a disk in the My Computer window, all file managers and generally everywhere.

A wonderful driver from Hitachi will allow us to make such a feint with our ears. Therefore, first of all, we need to download it, and then modify it.

Download Hitachi driver for USB flash drive

Unzip the driver archive and find the cfadisk.inf file. Let's open it. There is a lot of stuff in the file, but we need one section, it's called .

And it has the main line with which we do street magic. In the file, it looks like this:

Now all we need to do is to replace the selected part of the record with the identification data of the flash drive, which we will turn into a hard drive. And then we will change its name.

How to do it? First of all, plug the flash drive into USB port. Now open the Device Manager (for example, select Start > Run, type devmgmt.msc and press the key).

Expand the Disk drives section, right-click on the name of the flash drive and select the Properties command.

Click the Details tab. There, the Device Instance Code menu will immediately open, this is the code we need. Highlight the code with a single left-click and press the key combination to save it to the clipboard.

Well, then everything is simple. We open the cfadisk.inf file, find the section, in it the line that starts with %Microdrive_devdesc% and change the specified value after %Microdrive_devdesc% = cfadisk_install to the one copied earlier.

In other words, you need to change the line in bold below to the one you copied. Then save the cfadisk.inf file.

%Microdrive_devdesc% = cfadisk_install,USBSTOR\DISK&VEN_JETFLASH&PROD_TS1GJF168&REV_0.00\A7B03577C3F1B5&0

Now change the name of the flash drive. At the very end of the cfadisk.inf file, we find the line Microdrive_devdesc = in the section and change the value in brackets to any other. Initially, the value “UsbToFix” is indicated there, you can leave it.

The most important thing remains: install the updated cfadisk.inf driver for our USB flash drive. To do this, click on the name of the flash drive again in the Device Manager window and select the Update driver command.

The Hardware Update Wizard window opens. Now step by step.

In the first window, select the No, not this time radio button and click the Next button.
Select the Install from a list or specific location radio button, click the Next button.
Select the Do not search radio button. I will choose the correct driver myself and click on the Next button.

Click the Install from Disk button.
In the Install from Disk window, click the Browse button and select the driver folder where the cfadisk.inf file is located.
Windows will ask you if you really want to install the driver, click on the Continue installation button and then on the Finish button.

Now the job is done and the flash drive has turned into a hard drive, cheers. Unplug it, plug it back in and format it. And now look: instead of a portable device icon, the flash drive will be displayed as a hard drive.

Well, that's all, the flash drive has successfully turned into a hard drive, and now it will become available for the DISKPART utility, or maybe you will find another use for it.

winddata.ru

How to connect a hard drive to USB

Suppose you have upgraded your laptop and replaced some of the parts with more powerful, capacious and faster ones. Everything is great, but you still have old parts that are still quite working and it’s a pity to throw them away. Of course, you can sell them online or give them away for free. But among them there is a little thing that may still come in handy and this is a hard drive.

Unfortunately, there are often problems with a computer system that are not easy to solve. Someone needs to reinstall the OS sooner or later or restore the state of the PC. It is not always possible to access the hard drive to roll back the system or install a new one. Therefore, specialists use a flash drive.

Using it is much more convenient than carrying around a heavy hard drive. But for this you will have to learn how to do it. Many people find it difficult to do. But if you follow the instructions, everything will be much easier. To make it work, you need to get a flash drive or memory card.

Preparation

Before you make a flash drive a hard drive, you need to prepare everything for this process. First, it is necessary to deal with multipartition. As practice shows, it will have to be abandoned, since flash media cannot cope with other sections, but only work with the first block.

Next, you need to check if Windows works with a flash drive. After that, you will have to configure the definition of the drive as a fixed device. A flash drive is almost always displayed as a removable drive, and the system should "think" that a hard drive is installed.

Before you make a flash drive a hard drive, you need to understand that by doing something wrong, you can ruin the device. If the setting is incorrect, the drive will not be able to change its connection setting. Experts suggest using a special driver.

First stage

Can a flash drive be converted into a hard drive? You can, and it will be easy to do, it is only important to follow the instructions. After connecting the flash drive, you will need to determine its type. This can be done in two ways: using two commands or a special menu.

To do this, you need to open the drive management manager. Using the Win + R combination, you can launch the Run menu. You will have to enter the diskmgmt.msc command in the search bar. Information about the drive will appear.

You can also use In the new window you will need to enter the following command - list volume. To identify a flash drive in the list, just look at the size of the drive. You can also see the media type in the properties. Just go to the Volumes tab.

Second phase

How to make a flash drive a hard drive? After determining the type of drive, you will either need to change the connection or continue working with it. If, nevertheless, the flash drive is defined as a removable device, you need to install a filter driver. You can use the Hitachi Microdrive utility to do this. Thanks to it, you can not "physically" change the properties of the flash drive, but "deceive" the system, passing off the drive as a hard drive. Next, you can turn the flash drive into a hard drive. The system will allow you to divide the archive into several blocks that will have to work simultaneously. It will be enough to install the necessary software.

Third stage

Next, you will need to find the carrier number. Go to "My Computer", find the connected USB flash drive and click RMB. After selecting "Properties", go to "Details" and in "Properties" select "Path to device instance". The device number will appear below. In this line, you need to copy the characters after the second slash. The numbers will be needed for the Hitachi Microdrive program. Next, you will need to find out the bit depth of the system in order to figure out how to configure the drive.

To do this, just go to "My Computer", right-click on the free area and select "Properties". A new dialog box will display information about the system and its bit depth. After that, you can configure the program.

Configuring the Hitachi Microdrive Utility

If the computer works with a 64-bit bit depth, you will have to go to the folder with the program. In it, find the cfadisk document, find the chapter cfadisk_device and cfadisk_device.NTamd64. After the slash, you will need to paste the copied equipment number. If the computer is running on 32 bits, the cfadisk_device chapter must be used. Find the line DISK&VEN_&PROD_USB_DISK_2.0&REV_P and insert the media number instead.

Fourth stage

The last step is to replace the drivers. If a 64-bit OS is installed, one more parameter will need to be configured. For correct operation and installation of drivers, you will have to disable digital signature verification, otherwise the system will suspect fraud. In addition, it can update itself, which, of course, is undesirable for the process.

Now you can start the installation. Open the Drivers tab and select Download Drivers. Here you need to specify the path to the folder with the utility driver. The system will find that digital signature disabled, and then ask you to restart your PC. After the reboot, the flash drive will work as a non-removable drive.

Working with a hard drive

It is also possible to try to figure out how to make a bootable USB flash drive from a hard drive. It is enough to configure the hard drive to work with the OS. Through the "Control Panel" you need to go to "Administrative Tools" and "Computer Management". In the left column we find "Disk Management". In the table on the right, all information about the partitions of the hard drive will appear. Now you need to format the hard drive and delete all partitions. After that, you will have to partition the disk into sections and create a new volume. It will be enough to assign it active and write the operating system there.

Alternative

Thinking about how to make a flash drive an external hard drive also leads the user to the Lexar Bootlt utility. It is not often talked about, although it is very simple and effective for this task.

The utility is free and helps to convert a flash drive into a fixed device. By the way, thanks to the same program, you can return the drive to a removable type. The software is designed for Lexar devices, but can easily handle other flash drives. Also works with Windows since XP version.

But still there are some nuances associated with this program. The utility works with proprietary devices, but sometimes fails with other drives. May fail with USB 3.0 connection. And it is important to remember that after flashing any device, the warranty is lost.

After installing Lexar Bootlt, you need to run the program as an administrator, select the USB flash drive in the list, and then click on the Flip Removable Bit command. Next, you need to save the change and restart the PC.

Working with a laptop

Can a laptop hard drive be converted into a flash drive? As practice shows, laptops are not eternal, so many users simply abandon the device or simply sell it. But you can benefit from it by turning the hard drive into a drive. Usually it is enough to purchase a special box where to place the hard drive.

This option is suitable for hard drives that were installed in older models. For example, you can use a hard disk from 4 to 100 GB. Larger devices may not work over the rather slow USB interface. A similar box costs about 10-20 dollars. Included with it is the necessary cable to connect the drive to a PC. To install the hard drive, there are screws that will securely fix the hard drive in the case.

Working with a hard drive and a flash drive is not easy. You must be careful not to damage the drive. You should also follow the instructions for installing drivers and carefully use the commands.

Experts advise you to immediately figure out how to remove program drivers. In our case, we are talking about Hitachi Microdrive. To do this, open the properties of the hard drive and select update drivers. This process will automatically get rid of third-party installations and load the native driver.

Changing the parameters of the flash drive will lead to the fact that the user will be deprived of the warranty, so it is better not to experiment with a newly purchased device. In addition, if you make a mistake in the settings, you can lose the drive.

No matter how difficult the installation of the OS is, and my opinion is that it is enough to be friends with the computer and have two more hands in addition to the head - one right and the other left. To install an OS on a computer, you need or.

But what if there is neither one nor the other, it does not work optical drive, or do you have a netbook? After a little thought, I remembered that I have an external usb-pocket for the HDD and a free old HDD 2.5ʺ is also there. In general, if there is a pocket hard drive, it can be made bootable accordingly.

For this purpose, there are utilities with which you can do this, but I decided to use standard means Windows.

There are a lot of descriptions and videos on the network, but, unfortunately, there is one problematic point that the authors for some reason omit. Well, okay, I'll start in order.

Preparing an external HDD

Before working with a disc, be sure to transfer and save the necessary information from this disc to another medium.

All settings will be carried out as standard Windows tools 8.1. There may be some differences from previous releases of Windows, but if there are, they are not significant.

First of all, I want to note that making an external HDD bootable is much more convenient. I divided the disk into two partitions, one contains the Windows distribution, the other partition is for my needs.

1. Connect usb-pocket and go to Disk Management.

Attention! All data on the disk will be destroyed!

If you have Windows 8.1 installed on your PC, right-click: Start / Disk Management;

If Windows is older, open the Computer Management console: Start / Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Computer Management / expand Storage Devices / left click Disk Management.

2. Choose an external HDD disk. Be extremely careful, if you choose another disk by mistake, all information will be destroyed.

In my case, this is Disk 1. As you can see in the screenshot, the disk is divided into two volumes (partitions):

3. Delete disk partitions:

4. Create new disk partitions. One for the distribution, the second will remain for your needs:

Right-click on the free space of the disk, select the command in the context menu Create a simple volume:

5. In the New Simple Volume Wizard window that appears, click the button Further:

Specify the volume size of 4404 megabytes and click Next. Please note that the size is in megabytes. And since 1 gigabyte is equal to 1024 megabytes, then 1024 × 4.3 = 4403.2 megabytes is obtained under the distribution section (the weight of mine is 4.18 GB for example);

In this dialog, you need to format the new partition (FAT 32), press Further then Ready:

6. After that, you need to make the created partition active. (don't forget, because the computer will boot from this partition), for this:

Right mouse click, select the command in the context menu Make section active.

To the request for confirmation, we answer YES.

7. In the same order, we format the second partition on the disk, preferably in NTFS, but do not make it active.

Copying Windows to the active partition of an external HDD

Copying a Windows distribution to a bootable external HDD is quite simple and easy.

From bootable DVD:

Open the installation DVD in Explorer, select all folders and files, and copy to the active partition of the external HDD;

From the ISO image:

By and large, an ISO image is a kind of archive. So you can open it with any archiver. You can also open the ISO image through Total Commander or Daemon Tools. Well, if you have Windows 8 or 8.1 installed on your PC, then open it with Explorer. Select all folders and files, and copy to the active partition of the external HDD;

That's it, your external HDD can act as bootable media. Just reboot and set USB HDD as boot priority in BIOS (depending on BIOS type).

When you turn on your laptop, press F2, to ;
Go to tab Boot;
IN Boot priority order install USB HDD;
Click F10, and then OK.

If not, then check out the article.

Save your changes and get started.

As you can see from the text, preparing an external HDD for installing Windows is quite simple. And my description will not be complete if I do not talk about one problem, which for some reason is rarely written about on the net.

Making a hard disk partition active

When I divided the hard drive into two volumes, for some unknown reason, none of the disk partitions could be made active. This function was not available in the context menu.

The partition from which the computer boots is called active.

There are two ways to make a partition active:

Using the Computer Management console. We have already considered this method, but, unfortunately, for a number of reasons, the Make Partition Active command is not available. The solution to this problem is also not difficult. Remember how to prepare a bootable flash drive from the Command Prompt.
Using the Command line, through the utility diskpart. The second way is a little more complicated, but more effective. You just need to do all the operations carefully and slowly.

Setting the active partition using the command line

1. Connect an external USB HDD;

2. Click Start/All Programs/Accessories/ Command line . Press the right mouse button and select Run as administrator.

3. In the window that opens, write the command diskpart and press the button Enter. A prompt for working with the utility will appear - DISKPART>;

4. Enter command list disk and press the button Enter. You will see all disks installed on your computer;

5. Select the disk with which we will work. To do this, enter the command select disk 0, where "0" is the disk number in the list, i.e. for my external drive there will be a command select disk 1. Click the button Enter, the message Disk 1 selected;

7. Select the section with which we will work. We enter the command select partition 1, where 1 is the section number in the list, i.e. for the section that we make active. Click Enter, a message will appear Section 1 selected.

8. We mark the selected partition as active, to do this, enter the command active. Click the button Enter, a message will appear DiskPart: partition marked as active.

That's all. Good luck.