re-using hard drives

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montage

montage

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Has anyone successfully re-used hard drives from PC to PC?

My folks put a new hard drive in my very old machine (call it machine "A"), used it for a couple of months, then moved onto buying a completely new machine. I'm pretty sure that it's a 13G with very low miles on it.

Also in machine "B" I have a Maxtor 80G 7200 that was strictly used for audio file storage. This drive has been pretty well cleaned out except for a few non-audio system related files.

Is there any way I can reuse these in a new machine to create a standalone DAW? And are there guidelines I should follow, or things to look out for when I attempt this?

Thanks for all replies
 
montage said:
Has anyone successfully re-used hard drives from PC to PC?

.....


Is there any way I can reuse these in a new machine to create a standalone DAW? And are there guidelines I should follow, or things to look out for when I attempt this?

Thanks for all replies
Click to expand...

Sure you can. I'm not sure I understand what you have in mind though. Do you want to use it as your primary drive or as another audio drive ?
 
yes..

If it's a secondary IDE drive, I just unplugged my drive from one computer and plugged it into the other. If you have recent version of Windows it'll detect it.
If you need it to be a primary boot drive you can run windows setup to sort out the registry and it "should" preserve your non-windows(audio?) files. I've done this but it makes me nervous
 
I was hoping to use one as a primary and the other again as a strictly audio file storage. I might add that both were used for Win98 (1st) for the OS.

Future plans would be to run XP Pro.

Thanks again for the replies.
 
First I'd leave your audio hard drive alone and get your standalone DAW working with the primary drive. Your BIOS should detect it automatically with the latest kit however look at your manual it you need to manually configure it to see your drive. Then you want to run Windows 98 setup on it so you can boot off it. Next this might be useful:

http://www.icronticforums.com/showthread.php?t=216
look at Merrick's post.

And finally install your secondary drive - this should be easier except windows 98 might need a little help, I can't quite remember. It might just be a case of mapping a drive letter to it once the BIOS can see it. I'd read the manual on that one, some drives come with disks to help the computer handle the new giant sizes of the disks(they need to be divided into seperate virtual drives). Newer computers won't have so much trouble.

Just be very careful and back up your data if you can. Don't try to create new partitions or change any of the layout of the disks unless you can lose the data on it - if it's blank, go nuts. The simplest thing you want to do is plug in the drives and hope they just work. No formatting until you give up and can lose that precious data
 
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