Well shoot... this is probably gonna be the best place to ask, besides maybe instructables.com or howardforums. But seeing as how I hardly meddle in those places, I will start here =)

My situation - I have softmodded my Wii, and am currently using a 30 gig IDE hard drive to run disk backups of a few games that I own. For data, I use a IDE/2.5IDE/SATA to USB adapter I got off of ebay. Works great. But the low price, it did not include a power cable.

To power the drive, I found out that you can short the green wire with any black wire on the 20/24 pin block of a computer PSU to have it power on when it is plugged in. Using a molex lead, I power the harddrive.

However, this is very cumbersome.

What I want to do, is use a combination of the 2 usb ports on my Wii and an external USB battery I made (altoids battery charger, runs on 4x NiMH rechargeable AA's). The hard drive needs +5vDC over the red wire (@.63A), 2 grounds, and +12vDC (@.35A) over the yellow wire.

My current idea, is (this might actually work): Use the altoids box to provide the +5v (it actually outs 4.8v but for all purposes, it has charged whatever I throw at it), and use the 2 Wii usb ports + 1 or 2 NiMH batteries (@1.3v) to provide the other +12v. (one batery would give 11.3, and 2 would give 12.6)

I suppose I need to get my father's multimeter for this project.

Anyway, does anyone have some solid ideas for this?

OH ALSO ONE BIG THING - As I stated, the Wii has 2 USB ports. One is specific for some wii things, but the other one can work with other peripherals (it isnt supposed to, but with certain modifications to the OS, it does). since the 2nd port is what handles the data between the wii and the hdd, could I "share" the power, or could I just send the data wires to the hdd and route the power wires elsewhere?

EDIT - meh this is going to be more trouble than I am looking for, having to wire everything, and keep recharging batteries. New long story short - anyone know how to power a 3.5 drive without using a pc power supply?

You will need a device which is able to provide the power. It is designed to expect certain connetions to those points on the IDE device
Or you can put it in a USB external enclosure, once it is formatted and working properly.

any idea where I can buy one of these "devices", like at bestbuy or radioshack?
edit: not a usb enclosure, though.