can one exchange the harddisk btw computers

[joshuu]

Greetings
I recently come across a very old computer (a legend) which had very important information but it was very noisy at times especially after it boots and so I decided to clean it inside and actually it was very dusty.However, even after cleaning the noise was still there and after few minutes still wondering what was the matter,someone tampered with the power extension code the ups was using and at that very moment something happened.There was a huge smoke coming out from the power compartment and something burned up because there is no power in the motherboard.
What iam wondering now is if its possible to get the hard disk of that computer and place it in the motherboard of another computer (compaq) so that whoever was using that old computer can go on and work with her files.
any suggestions /advice would be highly appreciated :-|

[DaveSW]

you can do it, but it does have a number of complications.
When a pc is first built it will have all necessary drivers for that pc. when you move a hard drive to another pc you end up with the wrong drivers. That means you have to find all the drivers for the system it's going into.

Personally I would place it into another pc as a slave drive - on the jumper clips change it to a slave, and plug it into the spare plug on the harddisk lead. This then means the pc boots as normal on it's main harddrive, but has the other hard drive as a 'd' drive - another hard drive. you can then access your data from it.

[bentkey]

Depends on how old and what type that old drive is. If it's an IDE drive then no problem, you could add it to a newer style pc and read the data files as a second drive but if not you'll probably have to find another old machine that supports RLL or whatever old style drive it is. In the old days there were a number of different drive types, and the connection interfaces were different as well. So no, you may not necessarily be able to just plug it in.

[joshuu]

Thanks for that.I will try to place it as a slave drive but when I exprole my computer will I be able to see it or will be required to configure something somewhere.
Also how can one find out that a machine supports a certain type of hard drive like RLL or something else.

[Puckdropper]

If you have computer above a 286, don't worry about MFM and RLL drives. They've been replaced by IDE for almost 10 years or better.

When you put the new drive in the computer, watch the start up screens. If it detects it, (It'll probably say "Primary slave") then it'll show up in Windows. If not, then it won't. Some systems don't automatically look for new drives, so you have to tell them to do so in the BIOS.

[joshuu]

I did connect the two drives and are both accessible but there is only one big problem; the old computer drive had drives c,d,e,f the drive that is the master has a drive c but now the drive c of the slave drive can't be seen anywhere and its the one that is required
any suggestions?

[DaveSW]

drive c of the slave should have become drive d on your machine with both connected properly.

Are the jumpers definitely set correctly? i.e. one set to master, one to slave?

[bentkey]

IF you can see any of the partitions of the old drive and not what used to be the c partition on any of them, then go to control panel/ adminstrative tools/computer management/disk manager and assign the partition a drive letter.

[JR85023]

I agree I had a similar Issue and had to assign a drive letter to a Partition in one of my Hard Drives. Except that Disk Management would not let me assign it a drive letter, my only available options were Delete Partition and Help. SOOO, I ended up using Partition Magic and was able to assign it a drive letter.