Slave drive question. Will this work?

My hard drive right now has a serious windows problem and will not boot up. I have spent a few hours with HP tech support and they advised me that I need to reinstall windows in order to get the drive up and functioning. I have some data that I really do not want to loose that I hadnt had a chance to back-up yet.

Heres my question...If I buy a new hard drive and install windows xp on it and set up my old hard drive as a slave...will I be able to access the data on the old drive(XP not working) using the new drive(XP working)???

I have had a couple of different opinions from "very knowledgeable" people at local computer stores who have told me two different answers.

Will this work?!

Thanks in advance for the help!

 

You should be able to access the data with no problem, and copy it to your new drive if you wish. You likely won't be able to run programs installed on the old drive, however.

 

THANK YOU! So, if I copy the programs to the new drive they should work, right?

 

99% of your programs will probably have to be re-installed. When you install a program it writes information to the registry, puts dll's in the Windows directory, etc.

 

If you still have a program need to access in your old hard drive, try to use xcopy if you got a knowledge in DOS just try it, sorry Im not sure if it's working in XP os or try to install norton ghost and do the clone process this time Im really sure it's work