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Old Hard drive

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by cakester

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I have a DELL desktop. My hard drive was failing so I replaced it with a new one from Dell ( Maxtor,SATA 150 HDD, 250 GB maxline III)
I ran XP media center berfore and now installed XP pro. All is great but I now realize I did not remove all my files from the old harddrive and would like to know if I can safely replace the current good harddrive ( win XP pro)with the old one ( win XP media) and reboot without causing any problems? Is there a better way to do this? There is room in my system for two hard drives, but I am not sure on the procedure to connect both. Any help would be appreciated.

4 replies

by jiminpa

To use and external drive enclosure. They are fairly inexpensive and worth the money considering the aggravation it will save you.

by oh smeg

Do you have the necessary leads? You will need a SATA Data Lead and a Power Plug. The Power Plug may be inside the case as a unused Plug or you may need a Adapter to the SATA Plug type. The Data Lead will defiantly not be in the case and you may not even have a socket to plug it into the M'Board.

It would be simpler to plug the SATA Drive into a external USB Caddy and then plug the USB Lead into the computer. If you had a Password on the Old OS at Boot up you will need to Take Ownership of the Files by following the directions here

http://tinyurl.com/3aw7

Then when you have access to the Old HDD copy all your Files across as quickly as possible instead of using the Windows Copy it would be better to use something that works better and reports errors so download Super Copier2 free from here

http://tinyurl.com/37fnyn

As you said you had a failing drive you need to work as fast as possible before the drives fails totally.

Col

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