Two Hard Drives, Two Operating System, Not looking to dual boot.

Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
S

sqreach

Honorable
Jul 20, 2013
8
0
10,510
I have 2 PC's, one working and one broken. I need to get files off of the broken PC's hard drive (I know the HDD works) onto my working PC. I want to know if there will be any conflicts if Hard Drive A (working PC's HDD) and Hard Drive B (broken PC's HDD) are put onto the same system. Note that I will NOT be booting up the Vista HDD, I am strictly putting in there to move files (not programs) to HDD A.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
 
Solution
T
You didn't say what kind of hard drives so I'll assume SATA.

In general, the system will boot from the first bootable hard drive it finds. So as long as HDD A is connected to the SATA1 port on your mobo and HDD B is connected to a higher numbered port that should work. I would connect HDD B to the highest numbered port, i.e. if your mobo has 4 SATA ports connect it to port 4.

If the drives are PATA (IDE) drives, set the jumpers for HDD A as master and HDD B as slave.

When you first boot the machine after installing HDD B go into the BIOS boot preferences and see if both hard drives are there. If so, select HDD A. If not, just make HDD the 1st boot option rather than CD, USB, etc..
Sort by date Sort by votes
T

thx1138v2

Splendid
Jun 18, 2011
2,172
97
22,040
You didn't say what kind of hard drives so I'll assume SATA.

In general, the system will boot from the first bootable hard drive it finds. So as long as HDD A is connected to the SATA1 port on your mobo and HDD B is connected to a higher numbered port that should work. I would connect HDD B to the highest numbered port, i.e. if your mobo has 4 SATA ports connect it to port 4.

If the drives are PATA (IDE) drives, set the jumpers for HDD A as master and HDD B as slave.

When you first boot the machine after installing HDD B go into the BIOS boot preferences and see if both hard drives are there. If so, select HDD A. If not, just make HDD the 1st boot option rather than CD, USB, etc..
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Solution
S

sqreach

Honorable
Jul 20, 2013
8
0
10,510


Thanks Good Sir, much appreciated.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
O

Outlander_04

Titan
BANNED
Nov 18, 2008
20,308
4
74,960


Yes you are right . I wonder when they started doing that?
The 0-5 was the industry standard

I guess the lesson is to start at 0 if there is a SATA port 0 , and at 1 if there is not
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
popatim

popatim

Titan
Moderator
Dec 2, 2009
38,905
980
135,890
As far a I know, yes and get mighty confusing when the bios auto-renumbers them based on whats being used. Makes it hard to tell what drive is having an issue when a drive on sata_3 is being listed as sata port 5 in the os (stupid gigabyte board)
 
Upvote 1 Downvote
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom