Putting old hard drive in another computer

[manda]

i have a computer that will not come on and i haven't backed my files up lately. i was wondering if i could take the hard drive out and place it in another computer to get my files off of it?

thanks, manda

 

[xXxZxXx]

Yes, you can remove your harddrive from the dead and place it in another, as long as their is nothing wrong with the harddrive.

 

[tuant]

I'm assuming your old hard drive is an IDE. Make sure its to slave before installing it onto the second(new) computer. Another thing you can possibly do is purchase a USB Hard Drive Enclosure.

 

[raybay]

If you merely need to recover the data, then install it jumpered as a slave with the Windows drive jumpered as master. That works better than "Cable Select."
Then you can drag and drop your folders and files. Email is a bit more difficult, but there are plenty of programs at sites like www.majorgeeks.com that will rescue all data and email.
If you intend to use it as the main drive at some point, please be aware that is more difficult. The Windows XP installation will likely detect that the hard ware has changed, and will suspect a piracy attempt may be taking place. Windows XP will then shut down, and proably will never work until you install Windows again using repair mode.
The USB hard drive enclosure method that Tuant suggests does usually work well, and allows Windows XP to treat it as a slave drive, allowing several types of uses. The drive is more fragile in the external enclosure, and older drives may misbehave badly because there may not be enough power coming from the USB source. One way around this is to buy an enclosure which has its own power supply adapter.