A few months ago, I was having some computer problems, mostly resulting from having a teeny little hard drive with way too much stuff on it. I replaced the hard drive, and told the people who were replacing it to save on disk all the files in My Documents, thinking that would over everything personal. This was all my pictures, email info, text files, etc.
As it turns out, the saved email list seems to be inaccessible even though I have it on disk in theory. I can’t seem to open it. I wouldn’t mind so much if it weren’t for my business mailing list, which I’d really like to have back.
Also, a book I was writing which was mostly done was apparently saved somewhere else than in my Documents folder, and I really do not want to have to write the damn thing over again.
So- is there a simple way for me at home to get the files off the old drive and into the new one? I have just the one computer.
Thanks!
HennaDancer
The very simplest way–and it’s not as difficult as it may sound at first–is tyo install the old hard drive in the new computer temporarily as either a slave to the existing drive, or as a master drive on the secondary IDE channel. The advantage of the latter method is that you won’t need to change any jumper settings on either hard drive, but you will need to buy an additional IDE cable. You may need a power cable Y adapter, if there aren’t enough power connectors. When installing the IDE cables, the red stripe down one side will line up with pin 1 obn both the mainboard IDE connector and on the drive itself. On the board, pin 1 is usually identified by either a 1 or a small arrow. On the drive, pin 1 will be on the end closest to the power connector. You may need to enable the secondary IDE channel in your BIOS, but usually, this is enabled by default.
QED’s description is a good way to do it. Another way that does not involve disassembling the box is to get a outboard external drive box like this.
USB 2.0 3.5-inch Ext IDE HDD Enclosure
Yuu can put your old drive in this box and pull off what you need. If you were using MS Outlook or Outlook Express do a search in GD. IIRC there have been a few threads on how to import/transfer MS Outlook and Outlook Express files from one PC to another.
PIMF- GQ not GD of course.
Ok, I’ll bite. PIMF?