2nd Hard drive, New Computer.

I’m planning on buying a new computer for personal use ever since my old PC went to junk. I’ll only need it for internet, video editing and some light gaming (UT2K3 is probably the height of what I’ll subject it to). So far I’m looking at this one. It’s in my price range and its specs won’t get me made fun of by my friends. I plan to throw in old components from my last computer to spruce it up, but I need some advice before I attempt it.

I have my old 40GB HD from the old machine. There are some things on it I would have liked to save but the computer died before I could attempt backups. Now, I know nothing about installing new hard drives. My old OS was Windows ME and the new OS will be XP. Would I be right in assuming I will have to format the old drive to use it? Is there anyway to recover/use the information saved on it? I’m also concerned that the system linked above doesn’t have a floopy drive, from what I’ve read a boot disk is needed for hard drive installation.

Also I have the RAM from the old computer (256MB SDR), is it worth it to put it into the new system or should I not bother?

The good news is, the data should still be accessible on the old hard drive when you connect it to the IDE controller in the new computer.

The bad news is, your new computer may not have a spare IDE connection.

If this is the case, you may be able to temporarily connect the old hard drive by disconnecting the IDE connector from the CD-ROM or DVD drive, and you’ll be able to copy stuff to the new hard drive.

Your new computer will almost certainly “plug-and-play” the old IDE hard drive, no boot floppy or manual settings required on your part.

No you’d be wrong. XP can read the older 32bit partition table.

Possibly, you didn’t tell us how the old computer died. If the old drive is still in working order it should be fine once installed.

No, floopy drives are totally unecessary, on the other hand floppy drives do have limited use still but are not necessary for installing hard drives

You should not bother.

Your computer would have two IDE sockets (primary and secondary) and each one can have two drives on it (slave and master). The main hard-drive (for booting up windows) would be primary master. You might need to buy another IDE cable if you don’t have 2 that both have 2 outputs (to the slave and master). You should be able to have the 2 harddrives connected at once - as well as two other drives (such as CD-drives) - if not, you can at least temporarily have the 2 harddrives connected while disconnecting the CD drive. You might need to go into your BIOS to set up the drives and maybe adjust the little pins on the back on some of the drives. (with those pins you can set drives to be slave, master or “cable select” - cable select means it is slave or master depending on where in the IDE cable it is plugged into).

The system has a DVD/CDRW combo so only one IDE device plus the hard drive. If the system has two IDE slots he should be fine with his old drive because he’d still only be using three devices.

Let me offer my advice… get an external hard drive enclosure. Connect the enclosure to your new computer via USB, pop the old hard drive into the enclosure, and off you go. You don’t even have to open the case on the new computer.

I kept my old 40Gig HD when I bought a new P4 emachine last year. Now if and when I buy another computer can I add both hard drives to my next machine (thus I would have three)?

Sure, as long as you only have one other IDE device (CD or DVD writer). Otherwise you’d have to get a PCI IDE controller to add more IDE devices.

The machine you linked too, as well as most modern computers, uses DDR RAM - your current SD-RAM won’t work in it. Still 512MB should be enough for what you plan to use it for.

Also note that the machine you linked too doesn’t have a 3d card - it uses an integrated video chip. And to put it simply, UT2003 will choke integrated video. Unless you have a decent video card in your current computer, you will have to buy another one if you expect to be able to play UT2003 reasonably well.

…I’d also just like to thumbs up everything said here, and since I can’t tell what the OP’s newbie-ness level is:

Adding a slaved hard drive, or a new master and slaving your old one, is a very newbie-friendly upgrade, especially under WinXP. The most that you should have to do is reset a jumper on the board or the drive. It is something that you can trial-and-error your way through until everything works with no worry of damaging anything.

Well, thats a relief. I still remember messing with my old 200mhz computer, upgrading the hard drive from 2GB to 4GB. Plug and play is a beautiful thing. Thanks for all your input.

From what I can see on the pictures of the computer it looks like there are 2 IDE slots. One seems to be connected to the multimedia drive and the optical drive. The other just looks connected to the hard drive. So does 1 IDE slot = 2 devices?
So installation would be screwing the hard drive into place, plugging it into the power source, plugging the tail end of the IDE cable into the drive, and booting up?

RandomLetters, Yup I got that covered. A Radeon 9200 is one of the parts I’m salvaging. I was sure to pick a computer that had an AGP slot so I wouldn’t get stuck with Solitare. Still, thanks for pointing that out.

Yeah… if you’ve got the appropriate IDE cables…

Your old harddrive would have been a “master” harddrive, either set by jumpers (they’re on the back of the harddrive) to “master” or “cable select”. The new harddrive would be the same. Your CD/DVD drive would be set to something as well. Now you can only have one slave and one master on each IDE cable… so if you have 2 drives connected to 1 IDE cable, they can’t both be masters. (Or if you use “cable select” for one of them, that could cause it to become the 2nd master - depending on which part of the cable you plug it into).

If you’ve got some money I’d recommend getting an external case to put the old harddrive in then connect to the computer by firewire or USB. They’re good for transporting big files around (though not quite as convenient as tiny USB “thumb” drives)

BTW, I think in Windows ME you can format FAT32 drives to larger capacities than you can in Windows XP… the limit in Windows XP for FAT32 drives/partitions is 32 Gb I think… so if you want to format the 40 Gb harddrive to FAT32 in Windows XP you probably won’t be able to. (There is also the NTFS format, though that usually can’t be read in many OS’s such as Windows 98 and ME - FAT32 is better for a portable drive IMO)