PC hardware forum: Installing old hard drive into new computer

as you have an unused IDE port available. If no port available, there are still ways to do it. You need to tell us all of the aspects.

You must tell us about the make of the old drive and of the new one because it is possible that the jumpering of the drive may need to be explained.

I assume that the new drive will have the operating system on it, and you only want the old drivefor files that are on it or just the additional space.

Tell us what you want to use the old drive for. Also is it presently in a working computer, and what Operating System is on it.

hard drive in the old computer.

It probabably has an operating system on it. You may want to delete that, but you can wait to make that decision.

You should find out what file system the old drive is formatted with. Easy to find, just go to My Computer, right click on the drive and left click properties. It will either be FAT 32 or NTFS.

Then you should find out what file system the new computers drive will be formatted with. You should know that NTFS can read FAT 32 but FAT 32 cannot read NTFS. So if the old drive is FAT 32, then it won't matter what file system the new computer will use.

Next thing is when you get the new system to find out if there is an unused IDE port available. You should be able to find out from HP before buying it.

Also, if they give an option for a little higher wattage power supply, take the option because you will be adding an additional load to the new computer.

Very likely the new computer will use the new 80 conductor ribbon cable and the drive will be jumpered as CS or CSL [cable select] With CS, the connector at the end is always the Master drive and the connector in the middle is always the slave. You should change the jumper on your old drive to CS and plug it into the middle connector. Unfortunately this is not always easy with ribbon cables because the two drives must be mounted so that the connectors can be plugged into each drive.

Also some of the newer systems use mobo that favor SATA drives and only have one IDE connector on the mobo [for two IDE drives].

So you really need to know a little about the configuration of the new system that you intend to buy.

One way tother there will be a way to use the old drive, as long as the case is too small to mount another drive inside it.

I am aware of all of the aspects, the fact that hard drives fail, the need for backups, the ways to save to CD's. That wasn't her question.

and not programs that might not move over easily, if at all, hook the old harddrive up as a slave to the XP harddrive (make sure both harddrives are jumpered correctly for Master with Slave (XP) and Slave (old). Once you get to the desktop, XP's Windows Explorer will see the old drive as letter D: since there is a Primary Dos Partition on it (you can check the contents in a Windows Explorer window to be sure), and then just drag and drop from D: to C: for any files you want to keep.

Once you have done that, you can right click the D: drive, choose Format from the menu, and empty the drive out and use it now just for storage if you want to keep the drive hooked up. Otherwise, turn the computer off, unhook the old drive, make sure the XP drive is jumpered again as Master or Single, and boot back up.

TONI