Adding a HD from an old XP machine to a new Vista machine.

[Limper]

I recently built a new I7 920 machine and was wondering if I could add the hard drive from my old XP machine as I have alot of pictures on there I would like to be able to get at. I donated my old machine to a charity for people who couldn't afford a comp. I kept my hardrive because of the pics and personal info on it. It is a SATA HD (not sure of the make and model). I have a P6T SE motherboard and Vista but will be upgrading to 7 when it arrives in a few weeks.

Thanks .

 

[Paperdoc]

There should be no problem at all. You just mount the old drive physically in the machine and connect power and data cables. When you boot, check the BIOS Setup screens to be sure the SATA port is Enabled and the drive shows up. Since you're using Vista (going to Win 7) you do NOT need to have the BIOS treat this drive as an Emulated IDE drive - those OS's can handle native SATA devices already. Do NOT let your machine try to use this old device as a boot drive, unless you actually want it to do that in some situation.

Once it's hooked up you should just see it in My Computer ready to use.

 

[Limper]

Thankyou very much. That answers all my questions.