Old Computer > Newer Computer

mercman1969

Hi folks,

Hope you can point me in the right direction on this

I have an old (8 years) Computer that I put together myself it has 2 IDE HDD ( C & F)

I have recently aquired a newer HP computer that has a single SATA HDD

The question i need to raise is I need to retain the data on my IDE HDD's in the format they currently are (C drive looks at F drive for some data on 1 application that I use all the time)

How do i get the info onto the new computer....the SATA HDD is partioned as per usual HP PC's with a recovery partition

Cheers

JasX

get a freeware piece of disk partitioning software (or learn how to use the fiddly DOS style built in windows ones) and make two partitions.

call one C and the other F (sizes don't matter) then reinstall your software in the same places...

ANOTHER fix that might be a bit neater...

keep your new drive as a single partition, 'map' a drive on your machine to a folder on the C drive so windows thinks its the F drive (v simple, google 'map a network drive' but point it somewhere on your C drive). then just put the stuff your other program looks for on the F drive in there (being careful with directory structures so make sure it seems like the same place)

mercman1969

I was hoping to be able to just use the drives from my old machine in the newer machine
It is stable and has ALL my data from last 6 years or so on it

JasX

if your new motherboard has sufficient IDE slots you should be able to add the old drives, the existing F one you can just add and setup as an F drive.

you'll struggle with the C drive, it can;t be a C drive in the new machine as thats where the operating system of the current system sits -and frankly you'd not want it as your primary OS drive given how much slower IDE acess/data transfer times are compared to current SATA interfaces. plus depending on the requirements of the install process of the software you're using it'll likely need to be reinstalled on the new machine to run properly under the different operating system.

If you had the idea about running your old operating system from the old C drive on the new machine forget about it, it won;t have any of the correct hardware drivers for your new machine and will get very confused trying to talk to the hardware for your old machine thats no longer there. It certainly won;t be stable.

you 'could' add it as a further extra drive and call it, say G, but again software originally installed on a C drive will get confused with the drive letter change

mercman1969

What is the easiest way to transfer the data from the old 'C' onto the new 'C' drives then?

JasX

data?

easiest -> get an external USB drive, drag data onto USB drive from old PC, drag off onto new PC

less easy -> connect your old C drive into your new PC, (perhaps fiddle with BIOS to make sure its not being booted from). assign it a letter other than C (might be done automatically) and copy data between drives on new PC

NB above applies to DATA, for installed programs you should be reinstalling to the new PC from scratch.