Using A PlayStation 2 HDD In Your PC

Over the last few days I've been doing some conversion of old VHS tapes to DVD and quickly found my tiny 40gb hard drive getting completely full. So this morning I hopped in the car and went searching for some bargain HDDs, but all the stores around here seemed to have jacked their prices through the roof now that Christmas is over. I quickly remembered that I had another 40gb HDD sitting in my desk drawer that came from my PlayStation 2. I originally bought the drive (for $99!!) to use with Socom 2, but since the PS2 is on it's last legs (see pic) I decided to use it as extra storage in this trusty old Dell.

My PS2:

I had a little trouble getting it all set up, but now that I'm done I thought I would document the steps that I took in case anyone else is trying to get this done too. Disclaimer: I'm a developer, not a hardware geek so if your PC explodes by following these steps I'm not to blame. These steps are for use with Windows XP.

Afterthought: Power down the damn machine first please.

Step 1: Remove all jumpers. The PS2 HDD that I have happens to be a Maxtor (model # 2F040L0) and a quick check of the Maxtor docs told me that this particular drives acts as a slave when all jumpers are removed.

Step 2: Plug your PS2 HDD into a spare IDE port (I had a spare cable on hand that was clearly labeled for motherboard, slave and master inputs.

Step 3: Plug in a spare power lead from your motherboard. (See disclaimer above - don't blow anything up please).

Step 4: Secure HDD (or be lazy like me and lay that bitch on the bottom of the case) and close case.

Step 5: Power up PC.

Step 6: If not recognized by windows, install new hardware.

Step 7: At this point Windblows will not recognize the new drive, so right click My Computer, choose Manage, then choose Disk management. At this point you should see the drive as unallocated (I think that's what it was called - again, me = hardware noob). Right click on the 'unallocated' disk space and choose partition. You'll want to make sure the File System matches your original C file system type. Walk through this simple wizard and kick off the format/partition. Once it's complete you'll be all set. In my case I created a G drive that now has about 38gb of free space for me to use.

That's about it. Please feel free to let me know if anything that I've done here is incorrect or could be done better. But it works for me, so I'm happy.

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