Switching Hard Drives

OK, heres the deal. I had two computers. One died. I want to take the hard drive from that computer and put it in the other one. The working computer hard drive has Windows ME installed. The other one has XP. Can I clear everything on the Windows ME hard drive and make the XP hard drive the Master drive. I don't want to lose anything from the new drive. How do I go about this? Any ifo would help. Thank you.

 

unless the computers are absolutely identical- no. You can't jst stick in the hdd and expect XP to work. You can, however use the hard drive in your other computer, you just need to install it, make it the master, then reinstall XP on it. (backing up your data first obviously.) or you could stick with ME and use the new HDD as an extra

 

If you hook up the Windows XP drive as the master on a computer that it was not installed on, 95% of the time Windows will crash and will not boot to the desktop. You can, however, perform a safe repair installation (also called an 'in-place upgrade') and that will get XP up and running with all the data and programs intact (occasionally things go wrong if you have a corrupt user profile). But you need your XP installation CD and product key. If you don't have these, then there isn't much you can do except to hook it up, boot it, and hope it works, and it probably won't.

 

Hey dlb,

Couldn't he put the XP drive jumper on Master and the ME drive on slave, connect them accordingly on the IDE cable, then go into disk managerment and select the ME drive and reformat it, so he can use it as storage. Or will this not work cause of it not orginally bring installed on PC.

I have multiple drives in one of my PC, each having a different OS, but they were installed while in this PC. I didn't know so I thought that I'd ask

 

neat trick DLB- i learn something new everyday

 

In theory, yes. In practice, no. Because the XP was installed when the hard drive was in a different PC, it won't boot. XP has a way of 'bonding' with the hardware in a PC. When all of the hardware is suddenly completely different, XP can't handle it and crashes. But- most of the time, you can boot to your XP CD and perform a safe reload of Windows "over the top of itself". This reinstalls crucial system files that will run with the new different hardware, and should boot to the desktop with all files, programs, settings, documents in place and intact. Of course, the drivers for the new hardware must be installed, and Windows usually needs to be re-activated also. I've done this dozens of times (maybe hundreds of times) and maybe 1 time out of 40 or 50 it doesn't work perfectly. All the programs and files are still there, but none of the programs work. This is usually due to corrupt user profiles or corrupt registry hives (primarily the software hive or the system hive) that get 'disconnected' during the re-install. This wipes out the user account particulars like shortcuts, desktop settings, file associations, application data, application .dll files, etc. All the documents (like My Music, My Pictures, etc) are still intact but the programs that created the documents won't run correctly or at all even though they are still in the Program Files folder. Usually to successfully re-install these applications, you must remove the corresponding folders from C:\Program Files.
And because ME is FAT32 and cannot read NTFS partitions, you couldn't go the opposite route and boot into ME with the XP drive as a slave and expect to try to save the data from the XP drive. Now, if you hook up the XP drive as the master, and it miraculously boots to the desktop without crashing (you probably will still need to activate though), then, yes, you could format the ME slave drive from Computer Management and use it as a backup/extra storage drive.

:major
[dlb]

 

First, thanks for the tip. If I do the safe repair installation, will the files I have saved be there? Just in case they are not, how do I back them up if I can't get in the hard drive?