Computer People

[ABV]

I was hoping somone could help me out with this. I just bought a 120 gb external hard drive. I bought it so that I could put all of my video files, mp3's and pictures on it and have them all in one location. Before I had some at work, some on cd's, some at home, blah blah blah. I also have a bunch of files I want on another hard drive (internal) that was in my old computer. I don't have my old computer anymore, but I kept the hard drive. Can I just plug that one into a different computer and fire it up. I know the hardware will be different and all, but all I want to do is get the files from my old internal hard drive onto my new external hard drive without going through a lot of hassle. Any ideas?

[Matt D.]

You can plug as many hard drives in as you have controllers for. One IDE cable can hold two drives (master and slave, selected by the jumpers on the drives) including hard drives, CD-ROMs, etc. If you just want to get files off of that spare drive, just plug it in place of your CD-ROM (setting it to the slave/master setting of the CD-ROM) and turn your computer on. It should be seen in Windows, then just copy your files over. The only thing that might prevent this is if there is an operating system installed on that drive and it is set to be the active partition, which will mean that it will try to boot from that drive when you turn on the computer. Try it and see how it goes, won't hurt anything otherwise.

[ABV]

Cool, I will try that. The old hard drive does have an os loaded on it, but if I set it as the slave would that work? I actually do have the old computer, but I took some parts out of it to use on this computer. If all else fails I guess I could just rebuild it the way it was, and just do it that way. I just don't want to lose all the porn... errr I mean music files that I had. Thanks for the help.

[ABV]

Awesome. That's going to work great. I just unplugged the zip drive (never get's used anyway) and plugged in the HD, and now I have all of my old files. I was hoping it would be easy, and this was very easy. Thanks Matt

[Matt D.]

No problem, glad it worked out! :toast: