Heya, recently my modded out(lol) eMachine's motherboard fried out. Anyways, I have my 2 hard drives, that aren't ATA(The new HDs?), and I would like to transfer my files into the new HD of the new computer.

I want to format my new computer that has Vista on it and then put the files/programs from my old HDs onto the new HD, so I still have XP and all my files.

How would I go about doing this?

Thanks in advance, Swat.

Hello and welcome to TechSpot!

Let's say that you have hard drives A and B in your old (fried) system and hard drive C in your new system. A and B both have important files on them that you want to transfer, but A also has Windows XP installed on it, and C has Windows Vista.

Plug only A and B into the new system (remove C). Then boot into Windows XP. Move all the files you want to save (on drive A) over to drive B. Then remove A and plug in C, and you're good to go (with a dual HD setup).

If you have both A and C in the same system at the same time, however, you will probably be given the choice about whether to boot into Windows XP or Windows Vista (or maybe it will just boot into one or the other depending on boot device priority). So you have to use B as the go-between.

I hope this makes sense and helps you out.

Regards

The 2 old HDs are a differen't type of HD. Theres ATA(New?) and STA(Old?)
The connectors are differen't.

Yeah, I'm just saying that you can't access files from the hard drive with Windows XP installed and the one with Windows Vista installed at the same time. You'd have to boot up using the old hard drive (with Windows XP) and move its files over to the other old one, then take the other old one and boot with that and the new one.

As I understand you note, you have a fried eMachine with two HDDs. These HDDs are PATA (the flat gray cable). Then you have a new machine running on Vista. Its HDD is a SATA (the skinny cable).

You can not run Win XP that came with your eMachine on your new machine. Win XP from eMachines is set up to work only with their particular Mother Board.

Only thing you can do, is transfer files from the old HDDs to the new machine. This can be done by plugging in the PATA cable if you have a PATA (ATA) connection on your new MB. Otherwise you have to get a PATA to SATA converter. Plug it into one of the SATA connections and have the BIOS recognize it.

If you want to use any of the programs from the eMachine, you will have to reinstalled them under Vista, if they are compatible.