In preparation for moving next month, I gutted an old PC I had lying around the house. I salvaged the old hard drive and the RAM, and am now wondering what I can do with the old hard drive. It’s got Windows ME on it and probably some data. Can I just slap it in my new Dell Dimension 5100 running XP Media Center Edition, or should I try to mount it as an external volume? Any assistance is appreciated.
The old drive is probably an IDE drive, so since the motherboard for the Dimension 5100 ony has SATA ports for addtional drives, using it in a USB external hard drive enclosure would be the easiest. Otherwise you will need to add an IDE controller card. Unless you are only using one CD/DVD drive, there might be an IDE connector open on that cable.