Hard Drive Transfer

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Guest

I just built a new system and used my girlfriends old 20 gig drive to install
windows. I set up my old 160 gig drive as a slave because there's a ton of
info on it i don't want to lose and have not backed up :~( I read about how
to use disk management to assign it a letter (it wasn't appearing in my
computer) but is there a way to keep using this drive without formatting it
and losing everything? Is there a way to get in there and copy what i need
at least? I don't mind formatting once i have the important stuff backed
up. I gave it the letter "E" but have not formatted yet. It had xp pro on
it. The new install is xp home. Any help at all would be greatly
appreciated.
 
J.Paul said:
I just built a new system and used my girlfriends old 20 gig drive to
install
windows. I set up my old 160 gig drive as a slave because there's a ton
of
info on it i don't want to lose and have not backed up :~( I read about
how
to use disk management to assign it a letter (it wasn't appearing in my
computer) but is there a way to keep using this drive without formatting
it
and losing everything? Is there a way to get in there and copy what i
need
at least? I don't mind formatting once i have the important stuff backed
up. I gave it the letter "E" but have not formatted yet. It had xp pro
on
it. The new install is xp home. Any help at all would be greatly
appreciated.
Click to expand...


you already did all you have to do...
once you have given it a drive letter you are good to go...
if the drive is fat32 however...
you may want to convert it to NTFS
 
philo said:
you already did all you have to do...
once you have given it a drive letter you are good to go...
if the drive is fat32 however...
you may want to convert it to NTFS
Click to expand...
I suggest that you copy whatever you want from that 20GB HD before
converting it from FAT32 to NTFS (assuming that you, for some reason,
actually want to convert it). Conversion usually works, but converting
a drive with data that is not backed up is a bit of a high-wire act
without a safety net.

And FWIW, your XP PC will not have any problem with a FAT32 HD and a
NTFS HD, since both are supported. {To prove that, this PC has NTFS,
FAT32, FAT16, and FAT12 partitions -- just to show that it works.}
 
Thanks for all your help, guys. I was actually just trying to avoid
formatting the drive and erasing the existing files. Right now if i try to
get into the drive at all i get a prompt to format, which i would prefer to
skip. The file system for both drives is ntfs, so i'm not too concerned
about that. What i'm gonna do is pickup a drive enclosure and burn some
crazy dual layer dvd backups of my stuff. Then i'll format. Thanks again!
and if you can think of something better, faster or cheaper please post

J.Paul, Your Friend In The Digital Age! :~P
 
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