How can I access the material on my old hard drives put in a new system??

[Rastafari]

My computer refused to power on and I am told that the motherboard and the power supply have gone bad but the hard drive did not crash.

Will I be able to access the material (intact - programs etc) on the "old" hard drives if I put them in a new system?

If so, how do I go about doing that? I hate the possibility of losing ALL that stuff. I am desperate !!

Thanks

 

[veedubfreak]

Just pull the old drives out and put them in the new machine. You wont be able to boot off the old drives but you will be able to get at the old data.

 

[phucng_10]

Set the jumpers to a Slave and transfer from there.

 

[Capricorn]

What I prefer to that is either buying an empty USB external case and putting a hard drive in that. Buy new drives for your new rig (or a whole new system) and use the old ones for backup or whatever. You can also get one of those USB to PATA (or SATA if you have those, but I'd bet not) emergency recovery cables. Something like this one.

 

[GeRm20]

And you wont be able to run programs when u transfer them ierogram Files folder....due to the fact it wont be in the registry with the new machine...unless u have the actual setup file u wont be able to do it.

 

[Rastafari]

Thanks for all the responses - I am not feeling so bad now!!.

However, it would seem that the most important thing that I wanted to do - transfer complete programs - will not be possible as per the last response I got (from GeRm20). This will be a problem for me since I cannot locate some of the program CDs that I had installed.

Will I still be able to actually run the programs from the "old" hard drive that I will put in my new computer as a second hard drive? - that is without transferring the program.?

By the way, how do I go about transferring the material? Do I just copy to the new hard drive? As you have figured out already, I am a computer novice and so I am quite ignorant of what might be basic material!!

While I still have the floor, I have been told that the ideal way to set up your hard drive is to partition it so that there are separate partitions for 1-the operating system, 2-the programs/applications and 3-the data. If this is indeed so, how do I go about separating the data from the program itself so that it can be kept in a separate partition??

I know I am asking a lot but I am trying to learn as much as possible on my own!!

Thanks again.

Rastafari

 

[Hefemeister]

OK I am assuming you do not have the install disks for the programs you want to run. I prefer 2 partitions. 1 for the OS and program files and one for Data. Actually I prefer 2 hard drives 1 for OS and 1 for data. You could get a program like Norton Ghost on your new computer and make a ghost copy of your old harddrive. Since it appears you will have a new mb after you ghost the drive you will want to run a repair on the drive. This will move all of your programs without reinstalling them. Ideally you want to install a new OS reinstall alll of your programs from their install disks and move your data from the old harddrive.