Using internal HDD as external HDD
[Disclaimer: Please exercise adequate precaution if at all you try to duplicate what is given below.]
Since long I was chewing upon an idea, something which would help me connect my old hard-disks directly (without having to boot the CPU). The old CPU that I had 2 hard drives, an 8.4GB and an 80GB one, and they had been lying unused as I had shelved my desktop about an year back.
More than a need, the thought fascinated me.
I remembered having connected IDE hard disks when from the desktop whenever my friends used to give me their machines for repairing. It was a simple task of making the new drive a slave, and using the CD-ROM IDE cable to connect the additional drive. Then I used to enter POST and get the new drive detected, and voila!, everything worked.
The requirement was different here in that I wanted to be able to connect the hard drives without having to fiddle with the internals of the laptop. Few days ago, came across a post by Joel in which he had mentioned about being able to connect his SATA HDD using a docking station. This was the rise of the phoenix.
I began looking for a similar option for IDE, and a random search got me a number of options. By the next day, I was a proud owner of a USB-IDE connector cable, which additionally supports SATA HDDs. Connecting and getting the HDD recognized was a no brainer. The only thing to take care of is that the jumper had to be kept at master (see illustration here). The partitions were recognized with ease, except for the fact that since I was on Windows, the linux (ext3) partition had some issue in being recognized (more about that later).
I repartitioned the disk and it was good to go afresh!
I was, however, more interested in getting both the HDDs to work simultaneously. Here there were some issues: firstly, the USB-to-IDE cable had come with a power adapter, which had a single 12V DC output, and couldn't be connected. Secondly, I needed an option which is extensible -- say, in future if I wanted to be able to add another device (for example CD-ROM (hypothetical scenario)), it should be possible.
Thus came a need for a power supply which would help me connect a number of devices at the same time. Yes, SMPS it is. So I took off the SMPS from the CPU, and, thus came an interesting issue. I had no clue about the way to boot it. I had an idea, that it had something to do with the 20-pin female connector (ATX), which had a slot on the motherboard. I also obviously didn't want to short an incorrect combination and blow up the SMPS -- that would have spoiled all the fun! After a considerable amount of googling, I got to learn that the 13th (Green wire -> Power-on) and 14th (Black wire -> Ground) pin had to be shorted in order to simulate a power signal (see this). I plugged-in the SMPS, and shorted the two pin slots which got the SMPS working. [It was however warned on a number of sites and forums that there should always be some load on the SMPS, before that is done. Alteast one HDD.]
The above got both the hard disks running. The only issue that I didn't anticipate earlier was that the IDE-to-USB as well as IDE cable are all female ports -- this kept me from being able to connect both the HDDs recognized at the same time, through the typical master-slave combination, and connecting the IDE to the IDE-to-USB. I'm still on the lookout for a IDE cable that would have one male port.
I was also concerned about the HDD overheating because it was out in the open, so the heat sinking provided by the CPU case was gone. CPU processors have a heat sink attached to them, so I thought it would be a good idea if I could use the same for cooling the HDD. I got the heat-sink off the processor and the motherboard. The other good thing about this heat-sink was that it had a fan attached to it. Once I got it off, I detached the fan, and cleaned it thoroughly, and fit it back. Thus came up the next issue to get the fan running. The fan had a 3-pin female connector, off which I was unsure that which were the power ones. The fan label said nothing about it, or the polarity. What it did say was that it needed 12V DC, which I was a relief because I had plenty of it to spare. :) The SMPS also had 2 4-pin connectors (for devices like Floppy drives etc.) The issue was how to connect this 4-pin female to a 3-pin female (Fan). Apparently there are 3-pin to 4-pin adapters available, but I didn't have the patience to wait another day to lookout for it.
Next round of googling led me to understand that the three wires are classified as: Yellow (+12V), Black (Ground), and Green (Signal). Since the 4-pin SMPS connector (known as berf) also had Yellow and Black wires, I used an old wire to connect the corresponding ports between the two pins. The result was a delight -- Now my HDDs were running, and my heat-sink (if at all it's serving any purpose) sits atop one of the HDD, with fan running over it. As of now this arrangement looks a bit flimsy -- with the heat-sink just kept over it, but I guess it's much better than having the HDD without it. Also, seems there's a thermal paste which could help me affix the heat-sink, but that's a low priority.
OK, coming back to the issue of repartitioning the HDD -- the ext3 partition apparenly had some issue while formatting using Partition Magic 8.0 (WinXP). I switched to Ubuntu, where all the linux partitions got recognized, and Ubuntu has a wonderful utility called GParted, which formatted the ext3 partition without any hassle.
All of the above, left a much more satisfied me! :)