How to hook up a internal hard drive as an external hard drive

SOURCE: External hard drive not recognized

I recenctly bought a my book 500 gig drive and it is usb.
the firsttime I plugged the usb cable in it worksed. I had only a 40 gig ide harddrive and so I ordered an internal 500 wd hard drive to replace it. The internal 500 gig is a sata drive. first I cloned the 40 to the sata 500 and then copied the external 500 to the internal. I mover the cables to then make the internal 500 sata my boot drive. The computer would no longer show the external e\when i used the windows explorer. the device manager said it was there and working with no problem but windows did not see it.
After several experiments with diferent configurations I have concluded my motherboard wasauto configuring the external and internal 500 drives as drive 0. Since the usb was detected first and was notthe boot drive then windows assigned the internal drive as drive 0 and since the usb drive was drive 0 also it would not work. windows ignored it. my solution was to return the ide as the boot drive and plug the sata into a slave port. with that configuration both drive are seen and work normally. It took me several days to find this arrangement. so since my sata ports are auto configure and the external has a sata connection i will install an esata port adapter and try to hook it up as a slave sata drive so i cab\n use my internal 500 sata drive as my boot drive.
sorry this was so long but it is my solution to what others may be facing.

SOURCE: External hard drive

Try these steps: - Right-click on "My Computer" - Click "Manage" - Click on the "Disk Management" icon in the left column (Under the "Storage" category" - If your disk appears on the right-hand side, then try to right-click on it and create a partition. The issue may just be that, since the disk is not partitioned/formatted, a drive letter has not been assigned, which would cause it to not show up in the "My Computer" list Good luck!

SOURCE: My Computer does not show: Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 500 GB external USB hard drive

Well i got a simple 320 gb external hard drive, and since the first month i had problems, i solve the recovery issue by opening the hard drive, and find it out, the inside was broken, and it got unplugged. so plugged it back and got my info. if your data its more important than 200dlls or less break the thing open, because if you claim the warranty they are not responsible for your information.

SOURCE: External Hard Drive Not Regonized

Hello,
I can help you with this. Follow these instructions--> Start-->Control Panel-->Administrative Tools-->Computer Management, under the Storage section select "Disk management". Locate the external harddrive, and then change the drive letter.

Select the external drive. Right click, and select "Change drive letters and paths"-->Highlight the driveletter to change-->Click the "Change" button-->From the drop-down list choose an unused drive letter, and hit Ok.
The external drive should be recognized and accessible at this point. Let me know if you have any other questions.
Thank You, Raph30

SOURCE: WD Caviar SE16 WD3200AAKS 320GB 7200 not recognized at install

Windows XP does not have built in SATA drivers. You will need to download the XP drivers from Western Digital's website and install before the computer will allow you to format and use your new drive. Hope this helps.