[djkcp]

ive got 2 hard drives on my broken computer......one of them has only music and stuff on it...would i be able to take it out and put it into another computer or is there more to it then that?

[Rik]

That will all depend on wether the hard drive in question is an ata or a sata hard drive and wether your new computer will support both types. Ata is the older technology and has a large 40 way, 80 wire data connector and sata which is the newer technology has a 4 wire data connector.

Let me know if you need any more information. :)

[Xeon]

Both Hard Drives can be put into antother computer alsong as they use the same connections in both computers (IDE or S-ATA).
One of the Hard Drives will have an operating system on it, if you put this one into another computer you will have to reactivate windows for it to work with the new hardware.

The other hard disk drive, if this is the one with everything else on such as music etc should not have windows on it and should be your secondary or slave Hard Drive.

Overall You can put both Hard drives into another computer, but the one with windows on it will have to be reactivated with microsoft to work with your new hardware, or you will have to put another version of windows on it.

That may not be very clear, but hope it helps.

[philthomas]

As Xeon says, both will work ok, providing your new PC has the relevant connections .... if it doesn't, you can use a USB External Enclosure ... these come in both PATA (IDE) and SATA flavours.

If you try to boot to your old drive, which contains Windows, it will probably fail to boot, as all the drivers etc. will relate to your old PC. If you dont want to boot from it, just format it and use it as a Data drive either internal or USB external.

[Bubba]

So following this up, as I have a similar situation..... (just realized I have only 13 GB's left on my raptor) I can take a hard drive out of my old computer (that I never used) and put it in my new computer if the connections are the same? Will I need to use raid and will it matter that one runs at 10,000 rpm's and the older one at 7000? Or should I just go buy another 10,000RPM HD?

[Rik]

The 7,000 rpm drive will just be slower than the 10,000 one.

You do not have to use raid. The 10,000 rpm drive is your boot drive i expect. In order to raid it you would have to use a specialised system preparation tool as windows does not like being installed onto a raid array (this is true of ata as i have tried it out, but it may well be different for sata).

[philthomas]

Yep ... as long as you have the relevant connections spare .... you wont need to set up Raid and it won't matter what RPM it is. If it;s an IDE Drive, you may need to reset the jumper to slave ... it depends on what you have in your new box.

[Bubba]

Well, installing hard drives looks to be in chapter one of my new book (with the important parts I'll need on page 1239 in chapter 28 lol) so I will read it through twice and give it a go this weekend between the college football games Saturday and the Fontana race Sunday.

Before I go start studying it let me ask one more question: Since I want the new HD to be an extension of the existing one, I'll want to slave it correct?

[philthomas]

It depends what you have now ... i.e. if you have an IDE drive as your OS Boot drive, set as the Master on the Primary Channel and you add your drive to the same channel, then it will need to be jumpered to Slave.
If you have 2 x IDE Controllers on the mobo .. i.e. Primary and Secondary Channels, you can add it as either Master or Slave to the Secondary Channel.
The main consideration is .... you can only have one Master and One Slave on each Channel, so if you have a drive already on the channel you intend adding to, you need to note the jumper setting and use the opposite for the drive you are adding.

SATA drives do not use jumpers or have Master & Slave settings, so are different to IDE.

Hope that makes sense

[Bubba]

Yep. Clear as mud (j/k, I understand). I DO have SATA drives though, well at least the Raptor is, I've never looked at the one in the Dell I'm planning on using. If it's not a SATA, I'll go buy one.

Will the SATA drive work in tandem, or do I have to use them as separate drives?