Hardware Hard Drive question

[SUCCESSOR]

Ok so I have a lot of backups on my now half dead laptop. Literally half as in the screen got ripped off. The lap top still works when connected to a moniter or tv but right now I don't have a VGA cord. Anyway, I am getting distracted, I want to take out the hard drive get a USB adapter, move all my backups to c:/wbfs and use it to play them on my Wii via CFG USB Loader.

The Hard drive is a Samsung Spinpoint M6S HM251JI 250gb. Obviously it has all the windows software and other crap that has been on my laptop since i quit using it a couple months ago. It's NTFS of course but CFG USB Loader says it supports NTFS. Would this work? I mean is it compatible? Would it need plug n play drivers or something? I know i could get a external hdd for cheap but I can't afford cheap I am looking for dirt cheap.

As always any knownledge is greatly appreciated. And sorry if this is a common question. I searched I swear.

 

[2brncells_1gun]

Yes it will work. You should probably reformat it though.

 

[Ryoku83]

It will work as long as you find a compatible 2.5" enclosure for the drive.

 

[SUCCESSOR]

sorry I am not much of a hardware person. does it have to be an enclosure? wouldn't an adapter be the same? You know one end hard drive connections the other end a usb our two. I know they both come cheap but I literally have 22 dollars to my name right. I'm trying to get what I can for real cheap but I don't order something that won't be compatible.

 

[PsyBlade]

no it does not have to be an enclosure
but all plain adapters I have seen were actually more expensive

there are no real usb hard drives
all there is are ata/usb adapters sold in various shapes
(plain, build in enclosure with or without drive,...)

not all adaptor chips are compatible with usb loading
but that depends on the chip not the shape
there is a list in the wiki

 

[SUCCESSOR]

Well it was working fine but for some reason now windows 7 is says the drive needs to be formatted and fails at a NTFS format what is the best free software for formatting to FAT32?

 

[zizer]

Acronis Disk Director

 

[obcd]

there are no real usb hard drives

To my knowledge,there are real usb harddrives. The new western digital 2.5" passport series (usb 3.0 compatible) have the usb port on the harddisk controller board.
It's not a standard harddisk anymore with an adapter pcb. The adapter pcb electronics are part of the rest of the drive electronics.