Transferring data from old HD to current HD

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So a friend of mine's pc isn't posting. He's not concerned, it's a pretty old system and is interested in updating anyways. However there is one dilemna.

One his HDD, he has pictures of his dead brother that he'd obviously like to save. I'm going to do this for him, and had a couple of questions.

Is it as easy as hooking it up as a slave drive and accessing it through explorer and just dragging and dropping, or do I need a special program? Is the fact that windows is installed on both of these drives going to pose a problem, or because one is a master and one is a slave, it should be fine? Thanks for any input!
 
This won't pose a problem, as long as in the BIOS it's set to boot from HDD-0 or the Master. Just make sure to do that when you first boot up. I trust you know how to get into the BIOS?
 
I presume the old drive is IDE and not SATA as you say it's an old system, most new systems are supplied with SATA drives.

New systems do still come with IDE connectors but this is largely for legacy use. A lot of new systems still do come with IDE optical drives.

If you put your IDE drive on to the IDE connector of the new system it should still boot from the SATA drive by default but do check the BIOS settings for Boot order.

This can be tricky as the terminoligy used in BIOS often makes the SATA drive look like an IDE device for boot order purposes, some messing may be needed but simply for booting up you shouldn't be able to do any corruption to the Documents and Settings Folders which is, I presume, where his data will be sitting.

If your optical drive is connected via IDE simply unplug it an put your IDE hard disk in it's place, there should be a master / slave setting made by a jumper on the rear (not on SATA) they are usually easy to identify - set your ide drive to the same.

If any of this sounds a little too dodgy and the data is at risk then £15 easily gets you an external caddy to put your old ide drive in to, then simly connect it as you like to the USB2 port....

Hope this helps

PC-Fella
pcfella.co.uk
 
It was super simple. I connected it to an open IDE slot on my mobo, and opened the boot menu and made sure my sata drive was what it booted from.

Everything worked great, but thanks for the info and advice guys.
 
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