Question Hard Drives. Need Help.

[Guest_imported]

i just have a quick questions i was hoping anyone could answer:

If i buy a new computer, can i add my old hard drive as a second hard drive to my new one and still keep all of my files on it?

 

[jaeddy]

Almost always, yes. Issues to keep in mind: configure the old drive as a slave. If the old drive is slower than the new (quite likely) put it on a different IDE channel from your main drive (such as pairing it up with your CD on the seconday IDE).

A caveat- I'm not sure whether your system will have a problem with determining which drive has the active partition to boot from. I ran into this once on an old Compaq Pro-Linea, but other times it has been a non-issue. Any partition experts out there to fill in this gap?

 

[paparazi]

Personally I would transfer files over from old to new drive and then reformat the old drive so you have a lovely clean bit of space to use. You don't realy want to have an unused operating system taking up space on this secondary harddrive.
As has been said it may be undesirable to put this slower drive with the new one as it will undoughtably slow it down, so yes put it as slave to the CDrom.
If it is new enough to be ultra DMA then it may need a finer Ultra IDE ribbon cable, the same that the new drive is running on. CDrom will work fine. Martin Vote if you found this post helpful please!!