Old Hard Drive Issue

I have an old hard drive in good working condition that is currently in a dead HP computer. Until I get the dead computer working can I install this hard drive in my working computer as a secondary drive and be able to see and use my files that were created on the other computer? If this is not possible is it possible to setup my working computer boot loader to boot to either drive at start up? I have heard about dual boot, but never tried it.

 

The simple question is "Yes" if you have a free connector on your Primary or Secondary IDE ribbon cable. Just make sure you have the proper Master/Slave jumper configuration on both pieces of hardware ( 2-HDD's or CD-ROM/HDD) if your hooking it up as a slave on the Primary IDE or Secondary IDE.

 

Thanks Dobhar. I assume the answer to my second question is also yes if I change the Boot Loader information once the drives are installed?

 

If you try booting to the drive with the HP system all the drivers would need to be changed. It very rarely works and I think that you would have even less success with a drive that has HP OEM drivers loaded. If you got the HP machine going again and wanted to put the drive back in it, all the HP drivers would have to be reinstalled. Most likely that you would end up with very corrupted drivers, if the system worked at all.

Best use it as a secondary drive. I think you would be looking at a big battle trying to boot from it.

Matt
BTW welcome to the BBS , sorry to be the bearer of bad news