HardDrive/OS Questions

I built a new computer. I am a novice but it works fine. I installed 3 SATA2 drives and am running XP. My old computer died before I got everything off it's harddrive. It is an IDE drive with XP installed also. My new computer has an IDE slot available. I have a DVD-RW plugged into one of the 2 IDE slots. Can I put my old disk into my new computer, plugged into the other IDE slot without causing problems from having XP loaded on 2 different drives in the same computer and get to my old data? Would it just show up in Disk Management as an already-formatted disk assigned the next drive letter? I have an Asus P5N-E SLI board if that matters. Thanks for your time.

Hi, Congratulations on building your own machine. You should be OK fitting your old IDE hard drive in your Machine, but if you are wary of potential trouble why not get an external USB case for your old hard drive, this way you can get your data off, run no risk of messing things up, and have a useful portable hard drive for backing up, file transfer or archiving data. They can be picked up for a tiny amount at your spares shop or Ebay usually have some good deals available for a couple of pounds £2-£3 (GBP) or $4-$6 (USD)+postage. This would be my preferred and recommended course of action. However, if you prefer to fit your IDE drive to your MOBO then try setting the drive's jumpers to "slave" and you will probably need to enter your BIOS and stop your machine trying to boot from it as you will still need to boot from SATA. Good luck Regards paws

Thank you for your suggestion. I think I would like to try the external USB solution. Would I be able to plug this into any computer in the house (all have XP) and have it recognized much like it does my flash drive, camera and sandisk mp3 player? It would assign a drive letter and would see the OS just as files, ignoring any boot info, etc.? Sorry for the novice questions, but thanks for your help.

Hi, Yes, You are absolutely right, just put it in a USB slot in any computer running Windows 2000 or Windows XP and it will act just exactly as you say. For earlier versions of Windows like Windows 98SE a driver will be required but the drive enclosure normally comes with a driver disc if you ever need to use your external hard drive on an older computer. (you only need to install the driver once on an older machine then it will recognise the drive just like a newer system) I find them so useful that I would not like to be without one, You mention "anywhere around the home" I would confirm that you can extend that a bit to "anywhere around the world!" The only two requirements are a USB port and Win 2K or XP, and best of all no hassle! Regards paws