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Question

by Dan P: Computer broke, How do I set the old hard drive to work with another computer?

A few months ago, my computer broke and I salvaged what I could an tossed the rest. I recently realized that the broken computers hard drive had pictures and some other data on it that are precious to me. I wanna connect the HD to another computer in my house and retrieve the pictures. Both computers run XP, any ideas?

Best answer:

Answer by Mel -

First, you can open the other computer and hook the drive directly to it and run it as a second drive. Another choice is to purchase an external USB enclosure and install the drive in it. Either way, you can access your data on the drive. If you put the drive in the new computer be sure to jumper the drive to slave using the jumpers near the power connector.

Good Luck

Answer by I Bet I know more than you

All you need to do is plug it in… Im assuming you have computer knowledge since you took it out.

Hook it up, along with your normal harddrive and just start up normally and go to start>my computer> then the other hard drive should show up.

Answer by notrozer

just hook it up as slave (ide) or drop it on an empty sata port

and simply copy the stuff off

prob on \domuments & settings\\my documents\pictures.

if you need permissions change then right click on dir and goto permissions and change owneship to you and copy away

Answer by Sam M

Hey mate

I’m not uber computer savvy, but judging that the hard drive is probably an IDE drive, instead of sata, you should be able to open your case on your currently working computer, and plug the old hard drive into the IDE cord which will probably be attatched to your CD drive, yet should have a spare fitting about halfway down the cable for another IDE drive.

You may have boot conflicts between the two XP partitions when booting into your computer though, however when I did this I had no problems at all. Once into your desktop you should be able to access the drive through my computer. The ‘Detected New Hardware’ pop up should display in the corner once the computer has booted to let you know it has dectected that you have plugged it in.

Best of luck

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