Taking one hard drive from one PC to next?

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I had my old Windows XP Emachines tower die but the 60 gig hard drive is still good. Id like to add it as a second HD to a newer Vista Emachine Tower. Anyway to do this without losing the info on the ld HD?
 
Hook it up, make certain your BIOS is set to boot from the newer drive, and turn the computer on. You should have no problems unless you used drive overlay software on the old machine, enabled encrypted files/folders, etc.
 
Originally Posted By: tropic
Hook it up, make certain your BIOS is set to boot from the newer drive, and turn the computer on. You should have no problems unless you used drive overlay software on the old machine, enabled encrypted files/folders, etc.


+1

Try not to have this drive on the same cable as the other hard drive but never have it on the same cable as a DVD/CD Rom drive as this will slow the hard disk performance down a great deal.
 
Doesn't he need to make the 'old' drive a slave drive and the new drive the master drive through jumpers? It's been about 10 years since I have dealt with desktop computers but that's what we used to do in the old days.
 
Originally Posted By: tropic
Hook it up, make certain your BIOS is set to boot from the newer drive, and turn the computer on.

Why would he want to boot from it? He only wants to use it as a secondary drive. I believe you can still access files on that drive, even if you don't boot from it. It's usually a matter of modifying permissions sometimes to get access to personal folders.

If he tries to boot from it, most likely he'll get a ton of errors because whatever drivers he had on that old drive probably don't match the equipment in his new PC.
 
I think he meant 'newer drive' the drive that has Vista.

Basically, the Vista drive has to be the master drive C: and the computer should boot from it. The XP drive should be the slave drive and be a secondary drive.
 
Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete

If he tries to boot from it, most likely he'll get a ton of errors because whatever drivers he had on that old drive probably don't match the equipment in his new PC.


You'd be surprised how many components of PC today uses common drivers. There are only effectively 2-3 vendors for each types, and many of them have drivers shipped with windows that you do not need to swap driver to run.

If the other PC is also a DELL, the chance is even higher, not that I recommend it.
 
I just want to use the old HD to store extra files, not boot from it. I should have made that clear in the original post.
 
Change the jumpers on the back of the hard drive to 'slave' (there should be a schematic of how to do it on a label on the HD.

Then plug the cable and the power supply to it and you are good to go.
 
You may need to change the jumpers on the hard drive if it is IDE. If it is set to master, you may need to set it to slave. My Dells like the jumpers set to cable select. If the jumper settings are not on the hard drive you can get them from the website for the hard drive. If the newer computer uses a SATA hard drive you may want cheap aluminum case with power supply on Ebay like I did to make an old IDE hard drive an external hard drive.
 
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