Hi Ya'll, I bought a Western Digital model WD800JBRTL 7200 rpm hard drive to use with an external enclosure. The enclosure is an AMS Venus DS3 USB 2.0 model DS-2316B2BK. While I am waiting for the enclosure to arrive, should I temporarily remove the present hard drive and temporarily hook up/install this new HD on my computer and format/partition or otherwise prepare it for use as an external hard drive? Could I just wait and do that format/partition after it is installed in the enclosure and hooked up via the USB connection? Any advice appreciated. I'm one of the "a little knowledge can be dangerous" crowd when it comes to computers. Thanks!

I have been able to format drives in my external USB 2.0 enclosure (Belkin) with no problems. Also have swapped drives a couple of times and those that have been formatted in my computer also work with no problems. In my drive, the hard drive must be jumpered as a master which in most of my WD drives means no jumper. The jumper settings should be on a label on top of your drive.

Thanks, I guess I'll juts wait until the enclosure arrives and try it that way.

Enclosure arrived today and installed, partioned, and formatted the new drive; no problema. Pretty slick enclosure with built-in fan

Formatting an External HD using Win XP Windows XP doesn't acknowledge the existence of unformatted drives. Formatting the new drive can be done using computer management. Go to Start Menu->Settings->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management. From here you go down and click on "Disk Management." This will display a list of all drives, formatted and unformatted, and their status. The drive shows up as "Drive #" and Unformatted. Using disk management, format the drive and map it to F: (or any drive letter applicable for your system). After being formatted the drive is now displayed as healthy and is listed under My Computer. It can now be used as if it were a normal internal hard drive.

i was wondering if i HAVE to format my harddrive before using it in an external enclosure. I have so many harddrives and i thought that if i bought this i could easily change one to another.