Question About Hard Drives

I have a hard drive that is from a cheap piece of junk emachines computer but there is some stuff on there that I would like to put on our new computer but the mb is fried and it doesn't have a power supply anymore . Would i be able to just hook the old hard drive up to our new computer as a slave and just save it over to my new computer? it does have windows xp installed on it so thats why i was wondering, will it work to have two harddrives with windows on it hooked up as master and slave?

 

I have just what you describe. It works fine.

One added bonus is that every now and then I can boot to the slave and mess around, and not have to worry about breaking anything.

 

That can be quite a big bonus, too. You can use the "second OS" to get flat out rowdy with. Talk about tweaking without fear!

 

so leavin my hd in new computer just like it is and just simply adding the other one as a slave will work. theres no problems at boot when there's two hd's both with windows on it? so it just uses the the primary to boot up on and it see's windows on the slave as a bunch of files right? and if i do install it like that, i can just copy and paste stuff over from old to new right? cuz theres some programs on the old one that i no longer have cd's for and i would love to use them again. all i would need is to copy over the setup.exe file form the program to install it on the new right? thnx for all the help

 

You have to set the hard drives as Master/ Slave. This is usually done with some little jumpers on the drive itself. It's been a while since I did it. Maybe they have switches now...

Go to the web site of the HDD manufacturer and find out the jumper configuration for the drives. (Unless you still have the manual...)

The computer will boot to the drive it boots to now, as you are setting up the other drive as the slave.

You can copy and paste between the drives.

Once you have them set up you can boot to the slave (If you leave the operating system intact) and mess around in there. Use it as a learning tool.

As for setup files, not sure what you're asking there. If you need files from a CD and you don't have it you're out of luck.

 

thanks, i know how to set master and slave, i just wanted to be sure that there would be no problems because there are two operating systems on two different drives. i think there is a lil sticker or somethin right by the jumpers on the back of harddrive that show's which jumpers to put where for master and slave. anyway, thanks for all the help guys.

 

It's probably not going to be that simple. SETUP.EXE is usually just an installer that sets up the program and its associated files on your hard drive and writes some entries in the Windows Registry. SETUP.EXE may look for those files on a removeable drive, and may get confused when it can't find the files it's looking for to install them.

It'll also depend (in part) on what the installer did when it installed the software on your old drive. You might get away with it if you can copy all of the program files to the new drive in such a way that the full pathname to the program and each of its related files is identical to the original installation. If the program installer wrote files to the ..\Windows or ..\Windows\System folders, you'll have the devil's own time figuring out which ones you need.

Good luck!