ten bucks for a cable,I dont think so ..any ideas

I would like to install the hdd out of my old pc into the rig I just built so I can transfer all my old files and programs,xp can do this but I would have to buy a cable for 10 bucks can this be done without buying a cable to do it

well you could disconnect the cable from one of your optical drives and use that to transfer the files, then put it back when your done. Or you should have 2 IDE connections on one cable and from you sig it looks ya only have 1 HDD.

do you think I would have any problems considering that the old drive has windows on it???

no

NOPE windows is fine,i have a 13 with windows ME on it and i use it as XP backup for reformats.as long it is right file format

EX my linux WD40JB will NOT! work in windows

so should I just jumper it as a slave,???I still have an open connector on the cable to my master hdd

Joe Nugent said:

so should I just jumper it as a slave,???I still have an open connector on the cable to my master hdd

Click to expand...

Yes. The IDE cable will have 3 plugs on it. One side is in the motherboard. The middle plug is for a drive set as slave, and the other end is for the master. Turn off the computer, put the old hard drive on the middle connector (make sure the jumpers are set to slave), then attach power to the drive. boot the computer as usual. It should automatically boot from the Master drive.

After you get into windows, check My computer and see if both of the drives are showing up. If so, copy the files.

If the driveis not showing up in My Computer, don't worry. This is normal. Right click on My Computer, and click on Manager. This will open up the Computer Management window. Under Storage, click on the "Disk Management" icon. On the right side of the window, you will see all of the physical drives on your computer (Hard drives, CD-ROM drives. Floppy drives won't show up). You will see the names of the hard drives and their volume designation at the bottom of the right windows (C: and D: most likely). If you right click on the drive you just put in, there is a button that says activate or something. I don't have an extra drive to try this on, so I can't be certain exactly what it says. Anyway, you should be able to figure it out from there. Just make sure you don't tell it to format the drive, and your in business. Hope that helps.

Most likely it will see it fine, but as a note to the above, if it asks to Write Signiture to the drive, do NOT do it as this will lose data and require a format. If it does, you simply cancel the Write Signiture, exit the Disk Management console and either use a Windows recovery application or DOS bootdisk and copy the files. This one is free and works very well, within Windows(don't worry that Windows doesn't see the files, I've recovered files from previous installations including Solaris overinstalled with Windoes 2000):

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

thanks guys,I will post to let you know how it goes