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recovering memory from twin hard drives


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#1
carbonhornet

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Hello I had an hp m7680n and I believe the mother board was bad so i bought a new computer it is a new hp with a 750g harddrive with the quad processor i forget the model the new computer is running windows 7 the old one is running windows xp. I was taking some of the old components and swapping them with the new ones and realized that the m7680n has two harddrives both of them are 250g. i am now at a crossroads as how to go about finishing. the new computer has the room for the two harddrives but should i hook them up or will it mess up the machine. what would happen if i hooked them up while windows was running would i be able to recover my music and pictures from the harddrives. and which hardrive would have my pics and music on it or will i have to find out.

on a side not my old pc would not boot up when it died i heard the fans and some faint activity which turned out to be the hds(already tried to replace power supply only worked one more time and then the computer was done so i figured it was the motherboard.) and i only heard noise from one hard drive when it was making noise is this normal. I heard these twin drives work in sync with eachother is there something special that has to be done to recover my info.

my last pc before the m7680n was easy just bought a case and hooked it up via usb and found all my files was easy. can i do the same for these twin hds. thanks
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#2
Spyderturbo007

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the new computer has the room for the two harddrives but should i hook them up or will it mess up the machine.


Adding the old hard drives to the new machine will not cause a problem. I personally run 3 separate hard drives in my current machine, one for the OS, one for data and one for a backup.

what would happen if i hooked them up while windows was running would i be able to recover my music and pictures from the harddrives. and which hardrive would have my pics and music on it or will i have to find out.


Well, you obviously don't want to do it while the machine is turned on. :) As for which hard drive has the data, you would just have to poke around in there to find out.

and i only heard noise from one hard drive when it was making noise is this normal.


That depends. Some hard drives are louder than others, but typically if they are the same brand / model and the same age, one should not be significantly louder than the other, but it is possible.

I heard these twin drives work in sync with eachother is there something special that has to be done to recover my info.


That depends on how they were set up. There are different ways to configure a multiple hard drive system. I use them as separate disks, so my machine sees them individually. They can also be arranged in a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) fashion which means the OS sees them as one drive. So your 2 x 250GB drives would seen by the PC as one 500GB hard drive.

Then you move into things like RAID 0, 1, 5, etc. This is where things get tricky. Most users opt for RAID 0 or 1. RAID 0 writes half of the data to one drive and half of the data to the other drive which significantly increases read and write operations to the drives. The downfall is that if one drive fails, you lose all your data because only half is written to the second drive. RAID 1 provides redundancy by mirroring both of the drives, meaning the same data is written to both drives. There is no performance increase with this configuration, but if one of the drives fail, no data is lost.

If your system is RAID 0, you may have some problems. I've never attempted to recover data from a RAID 1 array using a different machine, so someone else will have to help out with that aspect.

Edited by Spyderturbo007, 30 December 2009 - 08:20 AM.

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#3
carbonhornet

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thanks for the replies! ok here we go I am concerned that the old hard drives are in a raid setup but now that i know it will not harm the pc im going to put both harddrives in and see how the computer reads them. If it is in a raid setup how will i know. if it works i will update you thanks for the help i should be done in an hour or so.
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#4
carbonhornet

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ok here is the update started changing the power supply but couldnt use it because the connector to the board didnt have enough pins on it, so i kept the factory power supply for the new computer. I installed all three hard drives on the computer. all of my info and pics were on the F: drive(from old pc), the H: drive(from old pc) had some sort of partition so i couldnt open it i tried but it wouldnt let me. Windows media player 12 updated the pictures and music but slowly for a minute i didnt think it was syncing the drive but i erased all the bs songs and sound effects that come with it and finally saw it was updating. pc runs nice now.

another side note should i swap out the power supply to a 550w and leave the factory as a spare? thanks for all the help.
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#5
Spyderturbo007

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pc runs nice now.


Perfect. Glad we could help. :) The partition you see is most likely a manufacturers' recovery partition which comes locked out of the box. You can get rid of it if you reformat the additional drives (from the old PC). Just make sure you grab your data first, if you decide to go that route.

another side note should i swap out the power supply to a 550w and leave the factory as a spare? thanks for all the help.


That depends. Can you send me the full specs on your PC, such as number of CD / DVD ROM drives, processor speed and model, video card model number, etc. We can then take that information and plug it into a power supply wattage calculator.

The only thing you have to worry about is what wattage power supply the manufacturer installed. Typically, additional hard drives don't draw a lot of power, but if the manufacturer skimped on the power supply and used the bare minimum, you might want to upgrade.

Edited by Spyderturbo007, 31 December 2009 - 07:30 AM.

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