new computer, old hard drive

vzfox

Solid State Member
Messages
8
I am purchasing a new system soon and the hardware environment is going to change alot. I have a 250 GB hard drive currently with XP Home and would like to keep it and put it in the new pc i purchase.

Will this be difficult to do? Can it be done?
 
Yes, i do have my XP cd.

The new pc i am purchasing comes with Vista Home and a decent HD, but i have so much music, videos and other crap on my current HD that it would take many burned DVD's to copy everything back to a new HD. I dont have any networking cards either to copy files and such to a new pc.
 
You can install the old drive as a "slave" drive and then copy over all your needed files and music. Then you could reformat the old drive and use it as a storage drive to hold your files and music.
 
You can install the old drive as a "slave" drive and then copy over all your needed files and music. Then you could reformat the old drive and use it as a storage drive to hold your files and music.

I was told that you can not run two drives, slave or not, with both of them having an OS such as Windows on the same pc. Both drives will try to load windows and cause major problems/issues.
 
I was told that you can not run two drives, slave or not, with both of them having an OS such as Windows on the same pc. Both drives will try to load windows and cause major problems/issues.

This is false, you can easily run two drives with two operating systems on it. If your buying a pre-built computer, you should be able to simply plug the old hard drive in, and it will still boot properly from your new hard drive.
 
DJ-Chris is correct.

You can also enter the BIOS to make sure the new drive is set to boot first so the old drive wont be seen as a boot device.
 
ok....i will set my current drive to the slave position, make the new drive primary and set BIOS to read the old HD as non-primary. After transfering what I need to my new drive, I will then format the slave drive and use it as a secondary storage device.

If I missed anything, please let me know....thanx for the assist.
 
You don't necessarily need to jumper the old drive as slave. It can be on an IDE or SATA channel by itself as master. You just need to make sure the BIOS is set to boot to the new drive first.
 
Back
Top Bottom