What will happen if i put in an HDD with windows vista into a newer computer?

MyKeyblader

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Nov 28, 2014
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I am trying to get some old photos of an old HDD. I plan to put the Windows Vista HDD into a system with 4 GB of DDR2 memory, an AMD quad core processor, and an EVGA GTS 250. Will anything bad happen like the computer not booting up? Or is it okay to put it in this machine.
 
Solution
You can connect as many hard drives as you want to your computer and it will never get "confused" as to what to boot first. The boot order is set in the BIOS. If you want to be sure, connect the 2nd drive then go into BIOS on the next power-up and make sure that your original drive is the first drive in the boot order.

mbreslin1954

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Since the old disk probably won't have drivers for the motherboard components, it will probably fail to boot, or blue-screen shortly after booting. Why not just attach it as an extra hard drive to another system, so it will end up as a "D" or "E" drive? Then you can search for your data and just copy them to somewhere else.
 

MyKeyblader

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Yeah i could do that. But do i just stick the harddrive into an empty bracket and attach the power connectors? I dont know much about HDDs.
 

mbreslin1954

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You'll need to plug in a power connector cable from the case's power supply, then also a data cable, the kind of cable would depend on how old the drive is, either a wide parallel cable (PATA) or a very thin serial cable (SATA). That's all you need, a data cable and a power cable.
 

SBMfromLA

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Be careful when connecting another harddrive to your computer like it was suggest above. I've done that in the past and it crashed my system a few times. The problem was... on boot the computer detected two boot loaders... the original one and the one from the hard drive in my computer... and that caused the one in my computer to become corrupt. Sometimes it doesn't happen... and some times it does...
 

mbreslin1954

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You can connect as many hard drives as you want to your computer and it will never get "confused" as to what to boot first. The boot order is set in the BIOS. If you want to be sure, connect the 2nd drive then go into BIOS on the next power-up and make sure that your original drive is the first drive in the boot order.
 
Solution