Windows 10: Hard drive dock

I have a hard drive dock and just got a new computer. What will happen if I try to put my old hard drive in to the usb hard drive dock? will it be usable or do I need to format it first?

:)

 

Connecting a WD Xtrnal hard drive to Lumia 950 XL

That will not work. The phone can't provide enough power to spin up that drive or any hard drive.

That wil only work when you use the Display Dock, that can provide the needed power.

But only if the drive is recognized by the phone, not al hard drives work on the dock.

 

Hard drive dock restarting

Hello,

It is a good idea to use a drive dock that will serve as drive expansion bay. Regarding your concern, what type of storage drive are you using? Is it a USB thumb drive or an external hard drive? There are a few reasons why the drive plugged on a dock will keep
on restarting. the most common is the connection of the dock to the PC is loosing, or can be that the hardware has worn out.

Try to use the dock over another PC so we can isolate the case.

Awaiting for your update.

 

Is the drive used or new? If its brand new then you may have to format it.

 

Do you mean an external Hard Drive case? Well typically hard drives for desktop are 3.5" and HD for laptops are 2.5" so the case has to match. They also have the mini MSATA drives and they have external cases to fit them. If you put the drive into the case and plug the USB cable into your USB port it should be recognized and assigned a drive letter by your compute. Now if that drive was used as a boot drive it will still have Windows on it. Having Windows on it won't be a problem unless you change the boot order in BIOS but Windows will take up space.

 

It should be recognized as an external, and let you access the files. If you use the same user account, you won't have any issues. If you use a different user account, you may have to take ownership of the files before accessing them.

 

Hi there

What sort of computer is it -- if it's like a NAS / miniserver / microserver then it will have a number of HDD bays where you can just mount the HDD into the caddy (usually 4 screws is all that's needed) and then insert into the bay. Depending on the machine (Hot swappable or Non Hot swappable) you might need to re-boot -- and if it's RAID you'll have to add the HDD to a RAID array.

If it's an external device that you connect via USB port on the computer then Windows will simply recognize it as an external HDD. Windows can INSTALL but not BOOT WINDOWS from this type of device - unless you have a Windows to Go system. Linux can boot from an external USB device.

If external but connected to an Esata port if you are lucky enough to have that type of external connection the computer should recognize it as a "normal HDD" and WINDOWS will be able to be installed on it and also boot from it.

Without knowing the computer you are connecting this to - it's difficult to give a more specific answer.

Cheers
jimbo

 

Never mind I think I solved my own problem