Adding newer drives to Windows XP and 8

[Daneel]

I get to play with a couple of new HP Envy systems (m/n 700-027c) -- Windows 8.0, 12 GB RAM, 1 TB -- when they are not being used in the office. They are available at Costco for a good price and with 2-year warranties (but see below). This might be a good, fast system

I tried running Spinrite on each one, and the Spinrite FD does not see these HDs.

I pulled one HP Envy HD and connected it to a Kingwin SATA to USB 3.0 Adapter and plugged this into my Win XP Pro laptop. The laptop acknowledges an additional USB device but does not assign any letters.

Then I tried plugging in the HD+Adapter into a USB port on the 2nd HP Envy system. It did not recognize any additional drive.

Then I mounted the HD from the 1st HP Envy into the 2nd HP Envy as a second HD. The BIOS saw the 2nd drive, but Win 8.0 did not see any additional drives.

Why am I doing this? The 1st HP Envy is having problems -- redirection failures, lots of pop-ups, etc. I want to scan its HD with some AV software installed on another system.

[Q1] What do I have to do to enable recognition of additional Win 8-formatted drives on Win XP and on Win 8?

[Q2] I was talking to HP India Tech Support last night. The tech and his supervisor (and then later confirmed by Costco) told me that if I install anything (eg, RAM or another HD or another card) inside an HP chassis, it voids the warranty!!!!! What kind of garbage is this? Windows 8 systems are designed to connect to the World. And HP chassis have additional bays and slots. Is this just a warranty cop-out by HP?

Thanks for your help.
Daneel

 

[gbhall]

Q1: XP won't have drivers for USB3. They will default to USB2
Q2: yes, a cop-out although I do sympathise with HP a little bit. The uncontrollable sort of things people will do that ultimately need a service call on a long warranty account for that.

For transmission of data and programs between XP and Win8 you will need to use the lowest common denominator, which would be USB2 pen drive/flash drives.

I'm afraid HP lost their premium hardware leadership many years ago, but still do some very proprietory things with PC's. Beware.

 

[Daneel]

Do you mean that an HP hard drive (from an identical model no. to a 2nd HP system) is not compatible as a 2nd hard drive on the 2nd HP Windows 8 PC????? I want to be able to scan the (first) hard drive from one system on another Windows8 PC to check for malware when the first drive is not active!?!?

Shouldn't this be possible, even with proprietary HP-to-HP hardware?

Please help!

Q1: XP won't have drivers for USB3. They will default to USB2
Q2:yes, a cop-out although I do sympathise a little bit. The uncontrollable sort of things people will do that ultimately need a service call on a long warranty account for that.

For transmission of data and programs between XP and Win8 you will need to use the lowest common denominator, which would be USB2 pen drive/flash drives.

I'm afraid HP lost their premium hardware leadership many years ago, but still do some very proprietory things with PC's. Beware.

 

[gbhall]

It's not being used as a second drive in identical hardware, in the general sense of being plugged into the motherboard directly, am I right ?

As I understand it, you have mounted the drive in a USB adapter?

Part of the problem may be that the HP drive is (for security reasons) possibly deliberately designed to only be useable in a certain configuration - as a GPT drive for instance http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg463524.aspx and the PC may have a UEFI bios to make it worse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface

I suspect you will have to use a much more traditional USB plug-in drive as an interface between your PCs

 

[Daneel]

It's not being used as a second drive in identical hardware, in the general sense of being plugged into the motherboard directly, am I right ?

As I understand it, you have mounted the drive in a USB adapter?

Part of the problem may be that the HP drive is (for security reasons) possibly deliberately designed to only be useable in a certain configuration - as a GPT drive for instance http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg463524.aspx and the PC may have a UEFI bios to make it worse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface

I suspect you will have to use a much more traditional USB plug-in drive as an interface between your PCs

=-=-=-
Thanks, gbhall !

No! I only tried to go through the USB3 adapter when the drive from the 1st HP was outside the chassis of the 2nd HP. Inside the 2nd HP chassis, the SATA hard drive from the 1st HP is now the 2nd SATA drive on the 2nd HP. Both drives are Blue Western Digital drives.

I am only looking for a temporary host system to malware-troubleshoot the hard drive from the 1st HP. I do not need to move files from a WinXP system to a Win8 system. But I want to understand fully the issues impacting moving drives between various machines.

Will WinXP handle GPT-formatted drives? If not, perhaps that is why my XP laptop only registered the presence of this SATA-thru-a-USB-adapter drive -- without assigning drive letters.

Thanx

 

[gbhall]

You're asking questions I cannot answer from personal experience. Maybe someone else can help. If you carefully read the 1st link I gave, you will find XP mentioned - and a definite no, no there. You would have to convert the drive to MBR. Furthermore SATA drives are only understandable to XP via a SATA driver, since there were no SATA drivers supplied with XP, we're talking 2001 here.

I can only repeat - "you will have to use a much more traditional USB plug-in drive as an interface between your PCs". That should not stop you having free-standing anti-malware running from a pen-drive, nor installing on the win8 machine from the pen-drive.

What happens on the 8.0 PC when the 2nd drive is installed and you execute diskmgmt.msc ? You might be able to assign a drive letter perfectly well. But if you make changes, you can easily make the drive unusable in it's original place, and will also have voided the HP warranty and will (deserve) no support. Beware UEFI secure boot !!

 

[gbhall]

A better way of running malware scans on a windows PC of any vintage is to create a bootable CD on which you have installed the latest scanning packages from all over. The way to do it is UBCD4Win - ultimate boot CD for Windows, which is an advanced procedure and you need a certain amount of expertise. http://www.ubcd4win.com/index.htm
If that link takes you to a download page, be sure to take the home link from there to find out what UBCD4win is all about.