External Drive Question

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jack Barrett
  • Start date Start date
J

Jack Barrett

I had my 3 year old eMachine motherboard die on me this morning!
Tested the hard drive from the dead motherboard PC and it's in good shape.

My question is this:

Can I buy one of those plug and play external hard drives, add my hard drive
to it and be able to see everything and open files?

Both the old hard drive and my current pc are running XP Pro.
Any other suggestions for getting the data off the eMachine hard drive
without adding it to my current pc as a slave drive?
Thanks Much. jack
 
Hi Philo....Thanks for the quick reply.

What does "Take ownership of the files" mean??

Thanks again. jack
 
Jack Barrett said:
I had my 3 year old eMachine motherboard die on me this morning!
Tested the hard drive from the dead motherboard PC and it's in good shape.

My question is this:

Can I buy one of those plug and play external hard drives, add my hard drive
to it and be able to see everything and open files?

Both the old hard drive and my current pc are running XP Pro.
Any other suggestions for getting the data off the eMachine hard drive
without adding it to my current pc as a slave drive?
Thanks Much. jack
Click to expand...


Yes that will work just fine.

Note: if you have some files within a former user profile
(such as within My Documents) you may need to take ownership
to access the data
 
Jack,
I do what you want to do virtually daily. Just get the appropriate 'name
brand' 3.5" housing, install the drive with the 2-4 screws, close the housing
and attach to the workstation (new or old) with a USB 2.0 port. USB 1.1s are
too slow!
You can attach the drive and the housing either before bootup or afterwards
presuming WinXP Pro SP2. I've not sure about the other OS'es. Vista will
probably work like WinXP Pro.
Once you've attached the drive launch Windows Explorer and you'll be able to
see the new drive down the left side of the WinExplorer window.
You'll be able to copy/paste any file you want. However, files and
directories associated with specific programs MAY need to have them
'properly' relocated as what that specific program/application wants.
At any rate, for Word, Excel etc docs, you'll be fine. Just find and then
copy/paste.
HTH
Tom
 
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