Not To Give My Friends Here Any False Hopes...

[BigDon]

I was going through some junk and I found an old hard drive of mine that must be 7 or 8 years old. If I can find a way to slave it in to my existing set up without hurting myself in the process I let you guys know. If its the one I think it is I might be able to upload large sets of Virginia Bell and Paula Page in the future. (I'm not going to hope its the drive that had my huge Mary Waters sets, that way I won't be disapointed.)

The only impediments to this process is my local computer wizard is very prudish about such things and I'm going to have to wing it myself. And as he's not dumb he'll wonder why I want to hook up a small obsolete drive.

Now as this was several OS's ago will my existing set up be able to read it? This might be pre-windows 98 and I'm running XP at the moment.

Any ideas as to what would be a good way to do this? I already have two hard drives installed and I'd hate to have to unmount one of them. Well obviously not my C: drive. Will just undoing my D: drive's connections and hooking them to the old drive outside my machine be damaging to my OS? It was an old C: drive.

I won't do anything dumb until I hear back on this.

BD

[normandjose]

temporarily connecting the drive as a replacement to your D drive won't damage anything BigDon and XP will be able to read it. remember you will have to set the jumper on the replacement drive to make it the slave drive.

a much simpler way though is that you can buy a little attachment which has a very short ribbon cable to connect into the ide connector on your old drive and a very short power cable to plug into its power connector. it comes with a mains adaptor to power it up and a usb cable. you then simply plug this into a usb port on your computer and XP recognizes it as an extra drive. in the UK these gadgets cost about £5, i use several of them.

[BigDon]

Well thank you for the tip! I'll wait til the first of the month then and buy one of those adaptors!

BD