The fan on my parents computer has died. It is an older XP desktop computer that they were planning on replacing soon anyways so instead of fixing the fan they are going to get a new laptop. Obviously they have stuff on the hard drive they would like to keep. I know the fan being down can cause damage to the computer. I happen to have the exact same computer at my home so my thought was to take the hard drive out of theirs and add it to mine so I could get their files off the drive without risking a meltdown and loss of everything. Then I could transfer the data to their new laptop from my desktop. I believe one of the drives has to be the slave of the other one so in my case theirs would be the slave to mine. Just curious how to go about doing this since theirs has an operating system (which is the same as on mine) on it, etc. Or would it be ok to run the computer without the fan long enough to get the data off the hard drive?
Thanks
It depends on which fan you are talking about. If you are talking about the case fan, then you can run the computer fine, though I would suggest taking the side panel off - and clean out the heat trapping dust while there.
If the CPU fan, then would not be good to run it. However, both case and CPU fans can be replaced pretty easily. The big worry with the CPU fan is cleaning off ALL of the old TIM - thermal interface material and applying a new fresh layer. See my stick on Thermal Interface Material for that.
Installing their HD into your computer as a secondary drive (NOT boot) is probably the best bet for copying off their data. The OS does not matter because you will still be booting to your boot disk, not the secondary disk.
If theirs is an PATA (also called EIDE) drive then that would be set to CS (cable select) or SL (Slave) - depending on how yours is set (if yours is EIDE too). If yours is set to MA (Master) then theirs must be set to SL. If yours is set to CS, then theirs must be set to CS also, and the system will figure it out by the cable position. The Slave is always in the middle connector.
If your systems are using SATA drives, then they use only 1 drive per cable so you just connect it to a spare SATA connector on your motherboard.
Alternatively, you could install their drive into an enclosure and attach it your computer (or to their new computer).
