[howlleo]

My old motherboard fried, so I bought a new computer. However, I would like to add the old hard drive to the new computer to save a big headache of transferring files.

However... I'm not entirely sure what to do.

My former computer was IDE (or ATA?) - it had those wide gray cables to connect the drives. My new computer is SATA, and has those fettuccini-style red cables.

Notably, the fettuccini cable doesn't have space for another hard drive on it. And I'm pretty sure my old drive would have no place to stick a fettuccini-cable.

I saw that the new motherboard *does* have a slot that fits the thick IDE cable.
I plugged my old hard drive into the new motherboard at that slot using the IDE cable. I also attached it to the same power cable that the regular hard drive was on.

However, the computer wouldn't start up. That is, it would turn on and give me the "We had issues starting up, probably something with your hardware, how would you like to proceed?"

How *should* I proceed?

Thanks!

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Need to do a Windows Repair on it from the XP CD. You can't just change the mainboard and expect it to work under XP, it'll almost always fall over.

[Neil Jones]

Need to do a Windows Repair on it from the XP CD. You can't just change the mainboard and expect it to work under XP, it'll almost always fall over.

[howlleo]

Oh even better - I'm dealing with Vista. That is - the new computer and HD is vista, the old one used XP.

So how do I repair it?

[Neil Jones]

My bad.

So the computer won't boot with your old hard drive attached? That's not good.
It often means an issue is or has been developing on the original drive. Vista seems to be more suspectable to this than XP.
I take it the old machine has XP on it and you've set the computer to boot from the SATA drive with Vista and not the one with XP on it?

[pip22]

Hi howlleo. As I understand it, you simply want to add the old disk as a second disk to your new PC. Your quickest way out of the problem is to buy an external USB hard-drive enclosure (cost about £25) from PC World or online and put your second disk into that (there's an IDE connector built into the rear end of the enclosure which is modified to accept a USB cable). Just make sure you get an enclosure for a 3.5-inch disk, NOT 2.5-inch which are laptop disks. The disk is dead easy to fit in the enclosure, and what's more you've then got full portability with it instead of it being fixed inside your PC.

UBB 2.0 may not be as fast as the internal ATA bus but I find it quite acceptable for backing my data, digital photos and other stuff.

Edited by pip22, 14 November 2007 - 06:59 AM.

[howlleo]

Jones: I haven't done anything except take the HD out of an XP machine and plug it into a Vista machine. In terms of 'setting' - do you mean I need to fiddle in the BIOS?

Pip: That sounds great, and if it's too complicated to get it in the box that's what I'll do, but I <i>would</i> prefer to get it out of sight and off of precious desk space - I don't anticipate needing much portability.

I'm not a computer klutz and have been into BIOS a small handful of times - I just need to know where to go. Would you be able to point me in the right direction?

Thanks.

[howlleo]

Is that a no?