Transfering data from one PC to another

My parents have given me their old PC for my kids. Problem is that they have a lot of their photos still on there. The old PC does'nt have a CD Burner. Apart from putting 4 or 5 pics at a time onto a floppy and transfering the pics to my PC (which does have a Burner), is there any other way of doing this?

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this so apologies if not.

 

You could try taking the hard drive out and hooking this up as a secondary slave drive in your PC that has the CD Burner. An alternative is if you have a driver for that CD burner to take that out and hook up to the old PC. There may be possibilities in linking the two PCs on a network between them.

What we would need to know is the specs of the old PC and the specs of the PC that you intend to use to transfer the data. This would help determine if the possibilities stated here are feasible and suggest others.

Finally, another possibility is to upload the files to a web hosting site and download from there but this may be time consuming and there may be security issues as well.

 

Sem, taking the old HDD and connecting it to your pc to transfer the photo files is probably the best option, however there are a couple of steps that you would need to go through in order for the process to be successful.

The old HDD would need to be partitioned further, ie if you have a C:\ you would need to create a D:\ and move the photo files to that partition. I use Partition Magic for this type of work but there are other such third party utilities. PM will allow you to use the program in DOS mode and for the copying process there are two ways of going about it.

1. Using PM make the primary active partition ie C:\ hidden and connect the old HDD as slave into the new pc. The D:\ partition of the old HDD will similarly show as D:\ when your o/s boot (assuming the same preconditions apply to the 'new' HDD). from that point you can just copy the files across.

2. Connect the old HDD to the new pc as slave. Create dos bootable diskettes with PM. Boot pc with those diskettes and then copy the whole partition (ie D:\) to the new HDD.

Neither of these methods is complicated but need to make sure you have PATA drives in both systems and jumper connections correctly.

Hope this helps

 

Simply jumpering the HD with the photos as Slave, and connecting it as the second drive in the PC you want to move the photos to should be all that's necessary. The PC will not attempt to boot from the slave drive, regardless of its 1st partition being set as primary/active and it will appear in Windows as the next logical drive letter. If yours is a WinXP machine, you may need to go into Disk Management and do what's called Import Foreign Disk, in order for the drive to be seen.

 

Thanks for all the advice.
This morning I literally had a brainwave. I copied and pasted the pics from my parents old PC to my MP3 Player. I then plugged the player into their new PC and copied and pasted the pics from the player to their photos folder. Simple in the end.
You know when you can't see the wood for the trees? That happens to me a lot.http://forums.majorgeeks.com/images/smilies/redface.gif

Thanks again for the advice.