[mlwjackson]

My wife's eMachine mobo died recently. The machine is not worth reserecting but there are many things on the HD that she did not backup to an external source. I am thinking about just passing down a very usable older Gateway PC and just putting her drive in that machine and building a new one for myself. The gateway already has two drives in it. I have seen PCI cards that can be added that will give me another IDE connector (both the existing ones are in use). Is there any problem with this? Her drive has XP home loaded but since it will not be the boot drive I would not think that would be a problem. However, much of the stuff she wants she kept on the desktop. I assume that I can just copy what is on the desktop of her drive to the desktop folder of the C: drive on the gateway and solve her problem.


Here is the URL to the motherboard into which the 3rd drive would be going and the card at which I am looking.

http://support.gatew...251360501.shtml

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16816102027



What problems do you see with this approach?

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each IDE controller can have up to 2 devices attached at a time...do you already have 2 HD's and 2 Optical drives attached to the IDE controllers in this PC?

if all you want is to save the data off the drive, you could either remove one of the optical drives and put the HD in it's place...boot the machine and copy all the important data over to the existing drives in the system...or you could get a USB HD enclosure for the drive and do the same thing...or even just use the drive as an external one for storing data

[dsenette]

each IDE controller can have up to 2 devices attached at a time...do you already have 2 HD's and 2 Optical drives attached to the IDE controllers in this PC?

if all you want is to save the data off the drive, you could either remove one of the optical drives and put the HD in it's place...boot the machine and copy all the important data over to the existing drives in the system...or you could get a USB HD enclosure for the drive and do the same thing...or even just use the drive as an external one for storing data