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.



Are you going to use that memory card?
BUT - i played the 360 last night for the first time and I'm HOOKED...i'm going to pick one up next month I think!
I stopped using my PS2 HDD a while ago and wanted to know if there was a way to hook it up to my PC for extra storage instead of having it lying around.
Thank you very much.
I have seen you =had= a ps2 with its hard disk, I wonder if you have the HDD utility disc
if you have it and you wish to sell it send me a mail
I'm currently developing a project (see page)
Greatly appreciated!
Now, I have a problem with this. I do not want to format it. I want to remove the data found in the HDD. It contains Screenshots of FFXI of about 4 years ago and I want to recover them. Any suggestions?
Thanks.
Feel free to delete this, if needed, I just googled and whatnot.
But yeah, thanks for the information.
I'm really bad with setting up hard drives and the like, so do you know if it'd be possible to set the PS2 drive as the master? See, I have an old computer sitting around that doesn't have a working HDD, so I figured I'd just throw this one in there for now, but I wasn't sure if that was possible.
If you could give me some info on this I'd be really greatful.
Thanks in advance,
-Sean