Two hard drives.

I'm donating a computer to our prison ministry and I'm swapping and replacing the present hard drive in order to retain (intact) my programs that are over 250 gigs.

My question is, how do I proceed to configure the array since I will be putting that hard drive into my other system that has an existing hard drive? Both are SATA and the existing HDD has XP Pro O/S and the other has Vista Ultimate installed (the reason I want both).

What are the pros and cons, if any?

 

Are you saying that you have an existing ARRAY set up and you want to give 1 away and then use the saved 1 and put to another HD if thats what you are asking the answer is no. If you try to add to another you will have to set up a new array and consequently all programmes/data will be unaccessible/lost.

 

Thanks for replying Toke.
I'm taking the (only) HDD out of one a) and putting it in another rig b) that will then have two HDDs.

 

I'm a bit confused here .... You have 2 hard Drives to go into one Rig, we'll call that one (A) both have an OS, one OS (Vista or XP) was in (A) originally ? the other came from a seperate rig ? (B) you then go on to say how do I proceed to configure the array do you mean dual boot ?? if that is the case the HD that came from (B) will not be configured with the motherboard (A) unless by a stroke of luck you have identical mobo's in both Rigs. So using the OS from (A) set to Master you then set the other HD to Slave but of course you wont have a dual boot unless that HD has been partitioned whereby you can format that section then reinstall the OS you want to make a dual boot. Of course the HD that will be Master will be the HD OS that was in situ and the other to be added. Am I on the right track here ???

 

The second SATA drive will be an added disk drive to the existing system. It sounds like you are not using a RAID, so there should be no conflict. There is no master/slave configuration with SATA, just one drive per channel. It will most likely not be bootable on the new system unless you have identical hardware as the old computer and it is placed in boot order in CMOS setup. It should appear as an additional drive with a new letter. If it has any kind of chip based security, make sure it has been disabled or it may not be readable on the new computer.

 

Yes you are so correct schpodzolok completely missed the Sata word. As I said I was a bit confused