Can I safely add this HDD to my DAW?

Hi,
My old internet/general purpose PC just died (the PSU of a very old Time PC, not worth repairing). I have lots of files on the HDD, the most important of which I've transferred to my new laptop. The rest I'd like to keep - old pictures, etc. My plan is to install the HDD in my fairly new DAW as a backup drive (partitioned). The DAW aleady has 2 HDDs, but I'm concerned that, as it was connected to the internet it could infect the DAW with a virus which could be disastrous. It has been infected several times in the past, and although there are no visible viruses on it now, there may be something hidden that Avast hasn't found. Is it safe to do this without formatting the HDD? Cheers.
Stuart.

 

From a saftey standpoint the answer is yes. I would run a virus scan on it when it gets installed on your new machine.

On thing however, most of the EIDE busses only allow two physical drives per channel.

 

DAW? does that stand for Dell-AlienWare?

 

I don't understand what this means.

Sorry, Digital Audio Workstation. My recording studio.

Stuart

 

What kind of drives does your new machine have? ATA or SATA?

Your old drive can not go on the same buss as SATA drives. If you have ATA drives on your new machine, and you have two of them, you will not be able to plug your old drive onto that buss. The one option that may work for you is to plug your old hard drive into the buss that has the CD-ROM. There could be some timing issues if you use the old hard drive and the CD-ROM at the same time however.

My choice would be to buy an EIDE controller, install it in your new machine and run the old hard drive off of that controller. EIDE controller is about $20.

 

The drives on both machines are all the same - Seagate Barracuda 80 Gb ATA. There is space in the Antec case for up to 5 HDDs.

 

If your motherboard doesn't have another EIDE controller the best bet is to purchase one and install it to run your old ATA drive.