Fried mobo - can I move my hard drive to another machine?

[sas1]

Hi all.

I'm pretty sure I fried my motherboard or processor. I'm probably going to leave it to someone else to fix it, but I was just wondering if it possible/advisable to take the hard drive from that machine and put it into another machine (both running XP), hook it up as a slave and back up everything?

Ordinarily I wouldn't bother, but there's a lot of information on that hard drive that is needed tomorrow, and I'm not sure I can get someone to fix the motherboard/processor in time.

If it is possible, are there any pitfalls or dangers that I should know about?

EDIT: Both copies of XP have different serials btw - 1 is XP Home Edition and the other is XP Media Centre

 

[CMH]

Hmm... from what I know, there shouldn't be any problems hooking it up as a slave drive and getting the information you want off it.

However, if you're gonna boot from it, might be a different story. WinXP might decide to give you trouble since you're on a different system.

 

[sas1]

No, I definitely don't want to boot from it, I just want to get a backup of everything on the drive. Today has been an absolute disaster and I just wanted to make sure it was ok in case I went and lost all the data as well frying a perfectly good computer. Thanks for your help.

 

[CMH]

Always backup. You never know when your HDDs will crash on you.

 

[sas1]

Luckily enough I backed up most of the important stuff on Friday, I just didn't get everything. Thanks again.

 

[CMH]

no problem. Lucky for you with that backup, I'd really hate to lose everything I have....

Which is why I'll be using a RAID5 array as soon as I can afford it. You should consider that as well, if your data is that important to you.