You had the hard drives you op sys from your old computer made into external drives plugged them into your new computer xp op sys can get all info except what was on 'desktop' on the external drives c?

Answer 1

I always recylce my old drives, mainly because it is so much easier than transfering the data to a new one. It isn't exactly possible to make them "external" drives because they are not configured that way. However, computers are more resilient than people think you can mount the drives in almost anywhere. The one thing that MUST happen is that it has to be on the same IDE cable as your main drive (that is the long skinny cable, the other is a power cable). Also, you have to set the drives to run as a "master" and a "slave" drive. To do this it is best to have the books on them, but you can just put what type of drive it is in a search engine and you should be able to find the configuration settings easily. Once you know the settings, you have to actually manually do it. You do this by getting some tweezers and looking on the back of the drive near the power cable, there will be a couple of rows of pins and you will notice that some of them are covered by a plastic "jumper". Where this jumper is will determine your drives actions. Usually a slave drive is simply no jumpers at all. Once you have the jumpers done, the cables on, and of course the drive screwed to the frame, you are good to go. power it on and see what happens. If you have an operating system on both drives it might ask you which one to go off of though. If you have the op sys on the master it should do it automatically, but you never know. Be sure to not put the shell back on the tower until you are sure that it works though, you don't want to take it off again.