Old hard drive into a new computer...

[fluffybunny]

Like someone else who recently posted, I want to put the hard drive from my old computer into my new one as a secondary drive. It says I need to reformat the disk, but won't that cause me to loose everything, and is there a way to get it to work without loosing everything I had on there? I had to take the hard drive out of my old computer because it wouldn't start up anymore, but the computer guy told me that I could try to put it in another computer to get the data.

Thanks!

 

[crshoveride1]

yes you can save that information and yes you can install it without reformatting it... depending on whether or not your using the same format. Meaning, you can't put an IBM formatted HD into a MAC. Dumb comment but you never know.

Set the jumper on your old drive to SL or slave and make the new drive the MA or master drive. When you boot your PC, Your slave drive most likely with be drive D or E and listed in My computer. You can't miss it

From that point, take all the info you have on that drive that you want saved and burn it to a CD or DVD so that you don't lose it. You then have the choice or whether or not to keep the drive the way it is or reformat it so that you have more space without all the old Windows gunk on it.

 

[fluffybunny]

ok thanks for the help! will a windows 98 go in ok to a windows XP? Or will I have to find a friends computer with 98 on it to use, because it seemed that the 98 didn't agree with the XP.

 

[Liquidlen]

Your question is not clear. Are you asking if Win 98 can live on the same machine with XP ? or are you saying the Old HDD had win 98 and the new HDD has XP and you want to know if XP can read the 98 data from the old HDD. (yes)

 

[crshoveride1]

as the previous post states, yes you should be able to read the data off the drive no matter what windows is on it. Chances are the file system is different as well but that doesn't matter either. As long as you have one of them as master and the other as slave. If you want, I'd be more than happy to save the info on the drive for ya....