[sharonrose]

I must admit that i am not very pc savvy so i am here asking for assistance. ok, I had a computer a few years ago and lightening went through the phone cord and fried it. I dont know what works and what doesnt. i kept the hard drive because there were things on there that i wanted to save. I need to know if i take the HD out of this pc and put the old one in...will it work? If its not damaged that is. All i really want is the pics off it. i am just afraid that it will do something to this pc. then, when i go to put HD that came with this computer back in will it be ok or will the memory, processor, etc. store anything and get confused with me switching between two hard drives. I appreciate any and all help on this matter. thank you all very much!
sharon

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Your best bet is to "add" the old hard drive to the new computer and then transfering what you want to the new drive. If you are just doing it to save what was on the computer you can simply unplug the cd drives and use that cable to plug into the old hard drive.... note this is a temporary thing just to get your stuff off... make sure you note how the cd's are hooked up so you can put them back....

as far as just putting it in as the only drive... well it depends on what windows you have.. windowsxp/2000 would not run unless they are identical, windows 95/98 might run with some issues and windows me may or may not come up....

[shard92]

Your best bet is to "add" the old hard drive to the new computer and then transfering what you want to the new drive. If you are just doing it to save what was on the computer you can simply unplug the cd drives and use that cable to plug into the old hard drive.... note this is a temporary thing just to get your stuff off... make sure you note how the cd's are hooked up so you can put them back....

as far as just putting it in as the only drive... well it depends on what windows you have.. windowsxp/2000 would not run unless they are identical, windows 95/98 might run with some issues and windows me may or may not come up....

[street1]

You should be able to add it in as a second hard drive jumpered as slave and copy all the files to the hard drive on you working computer.You should not need to remove the hard drive from your working computer.

[Kemasa]

Another option, assuming that the disk is not really old, is to get an external USB case and put the disk in there. Then you can get the data off of it and use it for saving other data. This also means that you would not need to open your current computer and do anything with it other than plug in a USB cable.

[sharonrose]

thank you all so very much! One more question. Shard92 mentioned adding it as the only one and it being different than the one i have now... the old drive is Win. ME and i have XP now. can i still add it as a second hard drive even though they are different? BTW...Thanks for bringing that up i never even considered the different windows programs.

Edited by sharonrose, 04 October 2006 - 10:13 PM.

[shard92]

thank you all so very much! One more question. Shard92 mentioned adding it as the only one and it being different than the one i have now... the old drive is Win. ME and i have XP now. can i still add it as a second hard drive even though they are different? BTW...Thanks for bringing that up i never even considered the different windows programs.

Yes you can... if it was the other way around... old drive had xp and new had me then probably not...

[Kemasa]

If you intend to use the old drive as a second disk, you might want to consider getting the files off of it and then re-creating the filesystem so as to remove all of the wasted space of the old operating system.

XP can read the old filesystem types, but older versions can not read some of the newer filesystems, such as NTFS, which is what XP tends to use. This is the reason why older drives can be read and why the reverse is not possible.