Funkii Munkii

Hi All

It's a bit of a long winded title and I have searched Google, with no luck, probably the way I've worded it.

So in essence now that I have my new PSU up and running I noticed it comes with IDE connectors and thought great lets take the HDD out of the old PC and plug into the new (ish) pc and use it fopr the extra space, photo's and music and taking their toll.

Now the old HDD was from a machine which had XP Pro installed and the new(ish) pc has Vista installed. Can I plug and play, kind of thinking i cant due to Vista and XP pro ?? The HDD still has loads of files and crap on it, most of which was backed up on a portable drive but I'd still like to have a look through it.

So is it possible

Thanks

Jimbob

iTrader: (13)

Get a HDD caddy as you can connect via USB, then access all your old information, and then you can format the old HDD and use it as an external HDD.
Used to do this when boot sectors got corrupted, and wouldn`t start up.

Ray T

could just set it as slave and plug it in to try, as long as it only the data you want and not the operating system.

hodgy0_2

the short answer is YES

boxst

Yes you can. You shouldn't need to worry about the slave setting as most PC's do it automatically these days.

Coffin Dodger

As above.

Once you can see it you can delete all the OS related stuff that you no longer need or better still copy all the stuff off it that you want to keep, format it, then copy the stuff back again to a now clean drive.

Ant

Yes just plug it in and make sure the bios boots from you vista hdd first.

Funkii Munkii

Thanks guys

I'll give a try later in the week, I was intending it to be a secondary HDD for all of our photo's and music once I have nosed through it and wiped it.

Cheers

jonc

You can use the hard disk as a secondary drive, but where's the challenge in that? Boot up the XP hard disk and use an archiving utility like winrar or winzip and back up your gigs worth of data to 1.44MB 3.5" disks, you can span the archive onto multiple floppies too. Then once all backed up, boot into Vista and restore the archive using your chosen archive utility. This should keep you busy for a while, this is what using Vista is like, slow and frustrating!

andys

Yes assuming your new motherboard has an IDE connector

Funkii Munkii

Valid point.........which I hadn't considered

That's the first thing I'll check

ramdor

iTrader: (2)

hang on, only got 8" floppy disks here after upgrading from punched cards, what is this new fangled 3.5" disk you talk about? work of the devil I tell ya.

hodgy0_2

see above

if it has not got a IDE connector, use a caddy - translates IDE to USB

sorted

bigsinky

only if it's an IDE caddy. Most have dual IDE/SATA connectors anyway.

Funkii Munkii

Thanks for all the info, "Comp Related" acts as a great learning curve as ever

I'll whip it out tonight and see what connections it has and then decide how to proceed.

Cheers

bioforger

iTrader: (1)

You can get PATA (IDE) to SATA converter cards which sit on the back of the IDE HDD to, if you don't have IDE connectors on your mobo, but want to keep the HDD internal. I do this for one of my old IDE drives.