Can i switch hard drives

I would upgrade to an SSD as he will get much quicker speeds and they tend to outlive the computers you put them in. Oct 8, 7 0 1, 0. You could move all of your important files to an external drive and plug it in to you new computer as long as it has a blank hard drive and windows. It seems that for win XP you could simply swap drives from one PC to another.

With win vista or 7 you need to find sysprep folder in windows directory delete it shut down the PC ,remove the drive plug it in to the new pc and windows will detect new hardware and recreate the sysprep file. That it. You must log in or register to reply here.

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Visit our corporate site. All rights reserved. England and Wales company registration number Today at AM. Yesterday at AM. Question Why is my storage almost full when there's nothing on the drive? You put the old hard drive in the extension, use the USB connection to connect to your new pc and let XP search for the drivers.

The extension will show up in your Explorer as your D: drive. When you are done with your copy, you can reformat the drive and use it as a backup.

It really works well if you have multiple PCs like I do. My problem is, I recently had a house fire and my PC windows xp home edition was still running when the firemen put the fire out. They cut the power to the house right off. Then the smoke and water was the other problem. The hard drive still runs and has my data. I have connected the hard drive to a lesser operating system windows me pc to read the drive and all the data points to recovery type files.

I do not recognize any of the file names that I used. I cannot find the d drive on my pc. When I insert the disc nothing happens. Can you help me? Hi I recently unpluged 1 of the IDE cables that was attached to one of my hard drives as I needed to attach my friend hard drive to translate data from him. I wanted to transfer files from a broken PC to my new one.. I simply unplugged the power cable and the data cable from the old hard drive, and used the new cables which then go from my old hard drive to USB port on my new computer.

My freind was drinkin next to my computer and decided my keyboard was thirsty. Well i have a usb keyboard and mouse because of no psu connections or what ever the standerd mouse an keyboard connections are called.

So i then decide i will install the drivers on my harddrive main one with root folders.. Or any other sugestions on how to install drivers on to my hard drive… Thanks, Danny. Its called a crossover cable. It connects between the ethernet ports on each machine. Look for U-tube videos on how to make your own crossover cable.

Not sure if USB cables have a special name for that or not. My Gateway computer failed. The hard functions. Can I build a new computer use my old hard drive with installed XP operating system in the new computer? The device manager shows it as being there and operational but it does not show up as a local drive anywhere. I did a lookup in DOS and it just doesnt show up. I have info on it I would like to transfer to the new computer. My SATA drive shows up fine.

I have a feeling it has to do with the drives being different types which is causing a conflict. If it is a second drive make sure the jumper connections are set to slave; or set both drives to cable select.

Next go to your bios settings and verify that the drive is installed in the bios. If you can see the drive in Device Manager then the bios knows its there, but check anyway to see if the bios has a problem. If the above items are satisfied go to device manager. Uninstall the old drive; and reinstall using add hardware process in your control panel. How can I get someone to help me with my previous question.

I see no one has responded but I feel there are others out there with the same or similar issue.. Appreciate some help on this if possible or respond to daanderud adelphia. You get in to that during boot up by holding the delete key. Hope it helped. Also, when I go into my computer I can see the new drive as drive E:.

I am pretty sure that if I format it I will lose all data… so, how do I get my new computer to be able to read the old hard drive. Seems like I am almost there but please help???? My e drive is asking to format exterior drive. How to recover pictures from external drive without formating exterior drive. After installing new hard drive I installed all data from old drive including Windows XP using system recovery disks.

One thing I cannot understand after booting etc,. I ran Disk Investigator and ran search for site I visited whilst on old hard drive, now removed, and to my surprise got positive results. How could this be I had not even visited any sites whatsoever since installing new hard drive. It depends on how similar the old and new machines are. I can remove XP or the new disc altogether. Will the OS in the old disc boot up in the new system or will it cause any data loss? I put my old drive in my new computer and I can see it with Explorer but it denies me access to My Documentds even though I am the Computer Administator on the new machine.

I did have a seperate user id and log-in on my old machine. Is there a way around this? No, there are other ways. But that type of enclosure may well be one of the easiest ways.

Can I remove my existing hard drive from my pc and instal in my spare pc, remove the hd from the spare. Both are windows 98se machines. Only difference is my spare is a p3 at mz old one is p2 at mz. I want the spare to operate the same as my existing. Thanks much. I just transferred an old Win98 drive to a new computer as the boot drive.

It works after much driver wrangling in the new system P4 — 2. Problem is WIN 98 under the new PC is still hanging a bit and looking for the old sound card, even after the sound card was uninstalled in windows. I did run registry mechanic and Destroy IT! There lies my dilemma.

Do you know how I would go about disabling the old HDD from booting up first? I have a similar question to matthew; I have just been given an old pc with XP pro on it. The pc I use now has ME. The one I have been given has no space for a second hard drive, however, my ME pc does.

May it be possible to put the XP hard drive in the ME pc? If so could I boot from it? I am trying to use an XP HD and connect to a 98 computer to retrieve files from it. Is it possible? And how? All I get is a white line going across the bottom of the screen. I have a new motherboard and tower i would like to use my old hard drive in the new computer as the primery drive i have put the old drive int the new one but it will not boot up can you help me with a step by step yours THANKS.

When installing an old hard drive in a new computer,does the old operating system need to be removed? Both are xp home with sp2. I would like to take this Hdd and place it in my new computer. This will be the only HDD I will be using. I have been told that it is hard to do. I think the person who told me this is just trying to scare me into paying him to do it. Is it possible to install the drive into the new computer and use it after I reinstall the OS?

Please help me. Tell me what I should do to make this work. Any ideas? This article was very helpful. The comments posted were also very helpful. I succeeded in putting the hard drive from an older computer into my Windows XP. It worked without me having to configure any settings on the PC. I just connected the power and pin cables and set the jumpers.

I set the original XP hard drive to Master and the older hard drive as a Slave. When I started the computer again it started as usual. When I went to My computer it had the added hard drive listed. Thank You. I have a related question. I have everything working on the old PC except that it is an old machine. I simply want to get more speed and do not want to reconfigure the OS. Old computer hard windows xp, new has vista. Leo, I have enjoyed your newsletter for years, and am happy to be able to contribute something for your other readers.

I have had great success in using a USB 2. It eliminates the need to open your computer to install the old hard-drive. The adapter allows you to access the old hard-drive from your new computer as an external disk.

The cost for the adapter is less than I have no connection to this Company, except as a satisfied customer. Best to you and yours. I often have to add a drive to a computer on a temporary basis. Perfect for transferring data from an old hard drive. My old computer pentium4,2. The motherboard failed.

I rebuilt it using new components pentium core2duo, 2. My old ide hard drive was fine so I put in in the box and made it a slave to the sata drive.

I loaded my original win xp-pro and my original office pro I made outlook express the default mail client. I tried your suggestion of downloading ie from the microsoft website, but that did not solve the problem. I tried a system restore and that did not solve the problem. I have been able to read and copy most of my data files to the old hdd to the new. I found the old address book and I copied it to the desktop, removed the read-only attribute in the properties view, but still get the error message that the address book file has been locked by another application that I am supposed to close.

But nothing else is open. I cannot find the old emails and where they are stored. I have no idea how to proceed from here. Thanks for any input. Ok I have an adapter, connected it. Can someone enlighten me? It simply shows up in my hardware manager and nowhere else. I was using Linux, on my old pc. Could this be the problem? All my info is in my old PC. It died suddenly.

The hard drive is not bad. I can hear it spinning. I need a lil help my old emachines motherboard crashed or shorted or something, instead of buyin a mother board I decided to buy a new comp for just bucks more or so.

With out damaging my new computer or the old hard drive?.. I too transfered my Seagate Barracuda I removed the jumper that was on the HDD. My computr recognizes the HDD but none of the files I had on the drive pictures, music, etc. Where are all my files???

Are you replacing your primary hard drive that the operating system is installed on? If so, we highly recommend that you start fresh on your new hard drive with a clean installation of Windows , versus copying the entire contents of the old drive to the new one. A fresh install of Windows will avoid any problems of data corruption or other software related issues that might have been present on your original hard drive. Yes, there are tools and programs that can "migrate" or "move" your OS and data from one drive to another , but the clean install and manual data restore method is usually the safer bet.

You can even think of the migration process to a new hard drive as a great opportunity to start fresh with a new operating system like Windows 10 , something that you might have been putting off because you didn't want to erase and restore all your data.

If your hard drive is failing or has already failed, or you need more space in your primary hard drive, then replacing it makes sense. However, for hard drives that are simply running out of space, upgrading to a newer one might be an overkill.

Hard drives that are running low on available storage space can usually be cleaned up to make room for anything else you want to put on them. If Windows reports low disk space , use a free disk space analyzer tool to see where, exactly, all the biggest files are located and delete or move whatever makes sense.

If you're looking to simply add hard drive capacity to your computer, or need a place to store the big files you don't need on your primary drive, consider using an external hard drive or installing a second hard drive, assuming you have a desktop and there's physically room for it.

Another option is to offload large and rarely used files to a cloud storage service. Using one is similar to using a second hard drive, but it's remote stored in the cloud and therefore arguably safer, at least from local damage.

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