I have an old Dell PC that I was going to get rid of when I move. Instead of getting rid of it, I was thinking of taking the internal hard drive and moving it over into the empty bay I have on another newer Dell I have.
Is this possible or are the internal hard drive connectors not compatible with an empty bay?
Should work. I’ve never had a newer PC balk at an old drive, unless the old drive wasn’t functioning. At any rate, it won’t hurt anything to try it. Here’s a link with pics.
I had a case where a client wanted their old drive transferred to a new eMachines PC. The only problem was the eMachine had a serial hard drive controller, so I had to add an IDE controller card in order to accomodate the old drive.
Thanks for the link! It seems pretty easy but what about the part with the power cables?
My newer PC already has power cables connected for the existing hard drive. If I take the power cables from the old PC, where on the PC frame do I connect the power cable?
I am facing a similar issue. I just got a new PC today and I was wondering about adding my old hard drive to it.
If the old HD had any viruses, will I infect the new PC? And if I download music to the old HD and pick up a nasty bug, will it be quarantined to the old HD and leave the rest of the PC intact?
Re: the power cords. Your new PC should have plenty of power available, and should have some extra connectors that you can hook up to the new hard drive. Everything should come from/go to the power supply in your new PC. The easiest thing to do is look at what was plugged into the hard drive on your old computer and find another one of those connectors on your new computer. It’s most likely a 4-pin connector with a plastic housing. They can only fit one way so it’s almost impossible to goon it up.
Good luck!
You’ll want to change the jumper settings on the drive you are moving. From ‘master’ to ‘slave’. http://www.ontrack.com/jumperviewer/
For Dell PCs, you can get away with setting the hard drives to Cable Select vs. master or slave. That should work fine.
It depends. Technically speaking, any viruses on your old HD would lie dormant until they’re run by either you or a program on your system. If you don’t boot from the other hard drive and never run any programs off it, I don’t think the viruses will be able to spread. However, it’s not really safe to knowingly leave viruses on there – if you ever forget and accidentally run a program, you’d be in trouble.
As for downloading music… your old HD is no less at risk than your new HD. Music files are not executable code and cannot carry viruses by themselves. The true danger comes from other potential security holes, like bugs in the music software itself (either the player or the downloading software), attached spyware, files that look like MP3s but are really executable, etc. If you pay attention to what you download and make sure that none of it is executable, you should be safe. Which drive you store them on is irrelevant, because once you allow a virus to execute, it has full reign over your system and can do anything to any drive.